Early Autumn Book Guide

The Metropolitan ‘Early Autumn Book Guide’ gives us something to read alongside our pumpkin spiced lives: Recovery, Intrigue, and Insider Tips That Take Us Below the Surface …

Read on, Dear Readers, read on … (and, pass the Cinnamon).

________________________________________________

Sunday Dinners, Moonshine, and Men

By Tate Barkley

For years Tate Barkley lived his life in shame—of living in poverty, of alcoholism and addiction, of being a closeted gay man. His story may sound familiar to anyone who struggles with feeling “less than.” Now sober through Alcoholics Anonymous, he shares his story in the hopes that it will help others to leave their shame behind and discover the peace that they deserve.

His new memoir, Sunday Dinners, Moonshine and Men, recounts Tate’s troubled relationship with his father and his journey to overcome shame and the scarcity mindset that blocked his ability to find peace in his life. Tate offers readers a deeply personal account of his dysfunctional childhood, from the backwoods of North Carolina, to his family’s struggles with poverty in Central Florida, and their ultimate move to the boomtown of 1970s Houston, Texas. He details his attempts to repress his sexuality and control his escalating drinking as he became a successful attorney, only to hit rock bottom and lose it all. Tate’s story is a quest to accept himself and find peace.

Sunday Dinners, Moonshine and Men is a Southern boy’s story of surviving in a good ole boys’ world. Tate fought his way back, ended a life built on lies, and forged a path to accept his true self―with or without his father’s love.

Now, a practicing attorney, speaker, author, and educator, Tate is living in Houston, Texas with his husband of six years, Anson, and their dog, Emerson.

________________________________________________

MASTER LOVERS

by David Winner

While clearing out his great aunt Dorle Jarmel’s midtown Manhattan apartment after her death, author David Winner, 2009 National Book Award nominee and winner of the Gival Press Novel Award,  discovers artifacts of her storied existence: notes from opera stars, love letters and artifacts from the Middle East of the 1930’s.

Dorle had been a co-founder of Angel Records and a prominent figure in the mid-century classical music world. But the more he learns about her life, the more complicated her story becomes, a twisted puzzle full of fascism and fraud and a record of a young woman grappling with her attraction to lovers with hair-raising political ties.

As Winner soon discovers, Dorle, an Orthodox Jew, had a tumultuous affair with an American reporter named John Carter, who was connected to Nazi propaganda before World War II.  She later married Dario Soria, a Jewish immigrant who escaped the Holocaust, and together they established Angel Records. They supported black opera singers and fought against racial discrimination. However, Dorle’s celebration of Nazi-associated musicians and her questionable associations confront the narrator with their own complicity and raise ethical dilemmas.

Equal parts fictionalized memoir and biography in which the narrator and the subject are both boldly present, MASTER LOVERS is a powerful work of family discovery, rooted in a bygone Midtown Manhattan and involving artists and politicians from around the world.

About David Winner

David Winner is the author of three novels, Enemy Combatant, Tyler’s Last and The Cannibal of Guadalajara, winner of the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and nominated for the National Book Award.

_______________________________________________

Featured photograph | Davyd Bortnik