Feeling festive this fall? Check out our new title picks for the season.

Summary and Reviews of Sunny's Nights by Tim Sultan

Sunny's Nights by Tim Sultan

Sunny's Nights

Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World

by Tim Sultan
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • First Published:
  • Feb 23, 2016, 288 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2018, 288 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer's The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it.

The first time he saw Sunny's Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront. Inside, he found a dimly lit room crammed with maritime artifacts, a dozen well-seasoned drinkers, and, strangely, a projector playing a classic Martha Graham dance performance. Sultan knew he had stumbled upon someplace special. What he didn't know was that he had just found his new home.

Soon enough, Sultan has quit his office job to bartend full-time for Sunny Balzano, the bar's owner. A wild-haired Tony Bennett lookalike with a fondness for quoting Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, Sunny is truly one of a kind. Born next to the saloon that has been in his family for one hundred years, Sunny has over the years partied with Andy Warhol, spent time in India at the feet of a guru, and painted abstract expressionist originals. But his masterpiece is the bar itself, a place where a sublime mix of artists, mobsters, honky-tonk musicians, neighborhood drunks, nuns, longshoremen, and assorted eccentrics rub elbows. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming city, Sunny's Nights is a loving and singular portrait of the dream experience we're all searching for every time we walk into a bar, and an enchanting memoir of an unlikely and abiding friendship.

1

Antonio

There is a corner turned, a direction taken. There is a door opened in everyone’s history that they can identify as the moment life, for better or worse, took a different course. Eve bit an apple. Dante saw Beatrice. Jack met Neal. For me, that corner, that direction, that door appeared late in the winter of 1995. The place was Red Hook, Brooklyn, the hour late, the mood desolate. I had gone to the night’s last showing of Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway and while driving home from the theater, mulling over the movie, I had half-­absentmindedly continued straight where I usually took a left, slipping beneath an overpass and entering a neighborhood I knew only by its forbidding reputation. There were no other cars and no people and long stretches of shadow between the streetlamps. I drove on. Deliberately getting lost had been a pastime of mine since early childhood. I was raised by parents who only asked that I be home before sundown. By adolescence, ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Woven into the story of Sultan's enchantment with Sunny's (he eventually left his job at the Paris Review offices in Manhattan to work as a bartender at Sunny's once the place began opening more regularly) is the story of the rise, fall, and gentrification of Red Hook, Brooklyn, a once-seedy and crime-filled backlot to Manhattan's glittering cinemascape. There is an elegiac quality to the last few chapters as we watch a once truly unique bar become the newly christened destination for a crowd of hipsters re-discovering Brooklyn's neglected neighborhoods in the last decade...continued

Full Review (919 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by James Broderick).

Media Reviews

New York Post, “Required Reading”
Sultan finds Sunny . . . a real character, a poet, a cinephile, a philosopher, bluegrass maestro and (Rheingold) beer server.

The New York Times Book Review
Fantastic ... [Tim Sultan takes] material that might seem familiar and [mixes] a perfect, insightful cocktail: full-bodied, multitextured and delicious. ... Simply beautiful.

Newsday
Sultan’s love of Red Hook shines through, and it’s hard not to be swept along on the ebb and flow of his emotions... Sultan’s book is, among other things, a meditation on the fragility of the moment and the passage of time... Wistful, funny and biting, Sunny’s Nights rewards you with its evocation of a certain place in time and, as Sultan calls him, ‘the most original man I have ever met.’

USA Today
An affectionate portrait of the idiosyncratic Sunny’s Bar in the Red Hook waterfront neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [A] polished, affecting look at remarkable barkeep Sunny Balzano ... In elegant prose, Sultan deploys laconic humor, an instinct for telling details, a taste for eccentricity, and above all, clear-eyed compassion for our all-too-human failings.

Booklist
Beautifully wrought, evocative ... an indelible portrait of an unusual man and a nearly forgotten part of NYC.

Kirkus Reviews
Sultan has a terrific subject in Sunny and his semilegendary watering hole, but the approach is too cute.

Author Blurb Howard Frank Mosher, author of God's Kingdom
This beautifully written chronicle of a disappearing place and its unforgettable people reveals how, sometimes, friendship endures when everything else, except perhaps the memories, is gone.

Author Blurb Robert Sullivan, author of My American Revolution
Tim Sultan tells the terrific story of how one dark and raggedy waterfront bar changed his life. It is a wonderfully drawn portrait of the artist as barkeep.

Author Blurb Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers
Sunny's Nights is more than an elegy for a bar and a neighborhood - it's also a vivid and loving portrait of the larger-than-life eccentric who gave the bar its name and its spirit, and a moving memoir about friendship and finding a home. Tim Sultan is a wonderful writer, wry and observant, with a sly sense of humor and a big heart.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



A Veteran Writer's Ode to His Favorite Watering Hole

There are two fairly common ways to memorialize someone: Raise a drink and propose a toast, or pick up a pen and write a tribute. But a handful of great writers have combined those two impulses and created memorable works that lionize their favorite drinking establishments. From Dickens' historic The George Inn in London to Hemingway's celebrated Paris haunt, The Dingo, some well-known writers have occasionally turned their literary focus to the publican's art.

McSorley's Old Ale House Perhaps no writer has been more adept at capturing the decadent charm of a local watering hole than Joseph Mitchell, a New Yorker staff writer who immortalized a Greenwich Village pub called McSorley's Old Ale House in a series of articles in the 1940s and 50s – many of ...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Sunny's Nights, try these:

  • The Electric Woman jacket

    The Electric Woman

    by Tessa Fontaine

    Published 2019

    About this book

    Tessa Fontaine's astonishing memoir of pushing past fear, The Electric Woman, follows the author on a life-affirming journey of loss and self-discovery - through her time on the road with the last traveling American sideshow and her relationship with an adventurous, spirited mother.

  • The Snow Queen jacket

    The Snow Queen

    by Michael Cunningham

    Published 2015

    About this book

    More by this author

    The Snow Queen, beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, proves again that Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generation.

We have 9 read-alikes for Sunny's Nights, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Final Cut
    Final Cut
    by Charles Burns
    Illustrator and writer Charles Burns is no stranger to the horror circuit. Most prominently known ...
  • Book Jacket: Season of the Swamp
    Season of the Swamp
    by Yuri Herrera
    Though he will go on to become President, reformer, and national hero of Mexico, in 1853 Benito Ju&#...
  • Book Jacket: Playground
    Playground
    by Richard Powers
    The primary narrator of Richard Powers' latest novel, Playground, is Todd Keane, who at 57 years old...
  • Book Jacket: The Empusium
    The Empusium
    by Olga Tokarczuk
    Not long after checking into Willi Opitz's "Guesthouse for Gentlemen," young Mieczysław Wojnicz...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Libby Lost and Found
    by Stephanie Booth

    Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.

  • Book Jacket

    The Bog Wife
    by Kay Chronister

    Five West Virginia siblings unearth secrets after the rupture of a supernatural bargain tying their fate to their land.

Book Club Giveaway!
Win Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward imagines the life of an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War in this instant classic.

Enter

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..