Tyler’s Last
Released October, 2015 by Outpost 19
“David Winner’s new novel is a double pleasure — for one, there is an engrossing thriller with an alternately hapless and capable scoundrel, flight and fight, twists and turns. . . The second pleasure is that that thriller is in the process of being written by an aging woman author who is transforming her own pursuits and betrayals in her fiction. This meta-move is clever, but it turns out to be much more than clever. She is, for all her high-handed treatment of her entourage, a memorably sympathetic and moving character. The two fictions reinforce each other resonantly. Bravo!”
– John Casey
“It’s hard to describe David Winner’s fascinating and original book. On one level it’s satirical, but as with any kind of comedy, its performance depends on our understanding the riff being done on very serious matters. Also, as the author knows, the serious and the satirical are by now often synonymous in people’s minds, our society has become so absurd. I kept thinking of Hitchcock, and the way he made his audience voyeurs. David Winner’s method is similar, though there’s more than a whiff of Tarantino in the Hitchcock homage, as well. It’s riveting and funny, a sort of dazzling movie script that is a novel that involves another book within it. . . It comes at you cinematically, but with the advantage of a novel that alludes to literary models, as well. Its language is hipster shorthand for readers to absorb as they become spectators to the extravaganza, as the book, itself, expands into its political implications. Tyler is certainly the last person I would ever want to sit next to on an airplane.”
– Ann Beattie
“Fans of Patricia Highsmith will be enthralled by David Winner’s perverse homage to the author and her milieu. This novel casts a narcotic spell, leaving one savaged as well as tremendously impressed.”
– Elizabeth McKenzie
“With the magical plot of Tyler’s Last, Winner proves himself a son of Nabokov. An aging, maniacal author’s struggles to finish her final “Tyler” book are divinely echoed and, ultimately, wildly entwined with the actions of her even madder creation. Just finished this tour de force, and I’m ready to read it again!”
– Elizabeth Evans
“Tyler’s Last is both parody and homage, aimed not only at the Ripley novels of Patricia Highsmith but at their lost mid-century glamour. A comic and dazzling movie-in-words, Winner’s book shuttles us around the globe–Italy, France, The Netherlands, Senegal–in a gratifying game of illusion and counter-illusion, color and intrigue, all rendered with Nabokovian venom and glee.”
– Zachary Lazar
David Winner 