When David Matthews’s mother abandoned him as an infant, she left him with white skin and the rumor that he might be half Jewish. For the next twenty years, he would be torn between his actual life as a black boy in the ghetto of 1980s Baltimore and a largely imagined world of white privilege. While his father, a black activist who counted Malcolm X among his friends, worked long hours as managing editor at the Baltimore Afro-American, David spent his early years escaping wicked-stepmother types and nursing an eleven-hour-a-day TV habit alongside his grandmother in her old-folks-home apartment. In Reagan-era America, there was no box marked “Other,” no multiculturalism or self-serving political correctness, only a young boy’s need to make it in a clearly segregated world where white meant “have” and black meant “have not.” Without particular allegiance to either, David careened in and out of community college, dead-end jobs, his father’s life, and girls’ pants. A bracing yet hilarious reinvention of the American story of passing, Ace of Spades marks the debut of an irresistible and fiercely original new voice.

“This is a loving portrait of a close relationship between a father and son, one slightly delayed by the fog of race.”—Booklist

About the Author: David Matthews is a writer living in New York. He has appeared on The Tavis Smiley Show and the CBS Sunday Morning Show, and in People magazine.

Want more scoop?

Read an excerpt from Ace of Spades
New York Times Review
Bookreporter Review
New Yorker Review
Reading Group Guide

Want to score a free copy of Ace of Spades? Leave a question in the comments field & if I use it on air, you’ll win a copy!

Have you thought about joining a book club but grew tired of the drama, the scheduling, the shrieking: I HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK YET!? Afraid to commit to a monthly book club but want to check out a few new books? Want to chat with today’s most buzzworthy authors, LIVE? From the comfort of your own home? Well, pull up a chair, put on a pot of tea and charge your phone, because Writers Revealed presents the WR Virtual Book Club.

Click here for more info! We’re going to announce our November/December book club selections shortly!

Online dating - passion or peril? You be the judge. This week I had the pleasure of chatting with Virginia Vitzthum, author of I Love You, Let’s Meet: Adventures in Online Dating. We chatted candidly about our forays into online dating, how Virginia moved from writing for Salon.com to developing a full-length book which examines the culture of dating online. We talked about the key players in the marketplace (and are we now to call online dating sites a “marketplace” - shopping for potential partners much how we’d select books to read or outfits for work or gadgets for our car?) and how their business has evolved over the years, the PROFILE and how many people use it as a means of reinvention rather than a vehicle for finding a partner. Is dating a numbers game? Does online really work? Have people found true love? On today’s show, Virginia Vitzthum and I dissected the commonplace act of meeting people via computer.

Missed the show? Click here to listen to the podcast.

*Join me next week as I chat with David Matthews, author of the memoir, Ace of Spades.

There are so many ways you can tune into Writers Revealed! Next show is this Sunday, at 7pm EST/4pm PST

1. Click here to listen to the live show
2. Going to miss the show? No worries. Click here to download the podcast
3. Want to call in and chat with our guest? Call (310) 984-7600
4. Want to chat with us? We’ve got a live messageboard
5. Or leave your question, nightmare/success online dating story, in the comments section below.

Want more scoop?

Listen to Chapter 15 of I Love You, Let’s Meet, as read by Virginia Vitzthum, the author.
Interview on Chicago’s WGN Radio
Read Virginia’s Salon.com columns

Enjoy!

Some 40 million Americans have tried online dating, about a quarter of all single people in the country. We all know someone who’s met his or her spouse online; many of us also have heard – or lived – tales of deception, disappointment and disappearance.

What we didn’t have was a book that explored how this amazing technology has changed the face of courtship. So I wrote one, interviewing dozens of online daters and focusing finally on 16 of the most dramatic and representative stories. I also weave in my own experiences online dating to illuminate the main differences between online dating and what went before: (1) more opportunities for creativity – and lying; (2) the blurring of dating and shopping; (3) the separation of sex and love; and (4) the opportunities to date more people than ever before.

Publisher’s Weekly writes of I Love You: Let’s Meet: Adventures in Online Dating: “More of a meditation than a guide, this volume combines research and the author’s personal experiences into a genuinely funny and informative read.”

Virginia Vitzthum has written for Village Voice, Washington City Paper, Ms., Elle, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and salon.com where she was the sex columnist. She’s also written a screenplay and a play and made a bunch of short videos. ILYLM is her first book. She grew up near DC and lives in Brooklyn.

Tell us about your online dating woes, conquests and successes! Or do you want to receive free advice about your online ad? Leave all the pertinent details in the comments section (no worries! you can leave anynomous comments - only I will have your email address) and a few lucky readers will score a free copy of I Love You, Let’s Meet!

On May 20, I launched my new live podcast show, Writers Revealed. I was terrified. What if I sounded like a complete idiot? What if I loused up the interviews? What if no one listened? What if no one cared? As my friend drove me to the Valley for my first studio show, I almost had a panic attack in the car. I gave serious consideration to jumping out of said car and walking down PCH, all the way home to New York. But after some stammering, some lame questions, some incessant use of “sort of” and “you know”, two months later I’m at the point where I feel comfortable on the radio and even more excited to spread the word on the books for which I’m most passionate.

In late August of 2000, I sat on a lawn with a crop of writers talking about our favorite books and authors. We were first year graduate students in the Columbia Writing program attending an incredibly awkward social mixer. I had come from a world of investment banking and corporate finance, and for me, literature was all about the dead. No Moodys, Minots, Fords or Cunnighams. These were not names in my vocabulary. So when I prattled off my list of favorite authors: Virginia Woolf, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, etc, etc, some bespeckled, unshaven idiot smirked. But what about authors now? Contemporary authors. He said these words to me as if I were a small retarded child. I stammered and replied Bret Easton Ellis.

Crickets. Tumbleweed. A lone fiddle.
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This week I had the great pleasure of chatting with Karen Abbott, author of the exhaustively researched and elegantly written book, Sin in the Second City*: Madames, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul. We chatted about the infamous Everleigh sisters and how they operated their palatial and decadent bordello for over a decade, the other brothels on the street which were rampant with beatings and disease, sex & the Victorian era - brothels were necessary evils because men needed a place to release their sexual urges and it would inevitably protect women from “unpure” sex and rape, brothels being a catalyst for change in the sexual culture at the turn of the twentieth century, the Everleigh sisters’ rivals (other madams, politicians and evangelical reformers) and their constant attempts to rid Chicago of the club, the politics of the day, the Marshall Field shooting, the art of rebirth and reinvention, white slavery narratives (porn for puritans) and the brilliant propaganda, the subversive politics of the Levee district, the downfall of the brothels and the sisters, could the sisters operate today?, and much, much more?

Missed the show? No worries! Click here to listen to the podcast.

*available in bookstores July 10. If there is one book you should read this summer, it should be this!

Next week I’ll be chatting with Virginia Vitzthum, author of I Love You, Let’s Meet.