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The Voyeur's Hotel (2016)

"Mr. Talese’s controversial new book, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” is once again about watching. Once again this celebrated journalist is skirting the lines between detective work, deviance and desire.

This book tells the story of the most fully actualized voyeur we are likely to encounter. It’s about a man named Gerald Foos, who owned a 21-room motel on a seedy strip outside Denver...

Yet one reason “The Voyeur’s Motel” is gripping is that Mr. Talese doesn’t fletcherize his material. He lays out what he knows and does not know in sentences that are as crisp as good Windsor knots. He expresses his qualms, but trusts the reader to come to his or her own conclusions. "

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A Writer's Life (2006)

"A Writer's Life is a book told as if Homer had stood you to a martini at a comfortable bar, saying 'Let me tell you about my life, but first let's start with Achilles.' The virtue of this approach is a cracking good read...It is as if behind Talese's dapper, tailored suits there lies a heart of ravenous sponge, soaking up the world--and squeezing it back out across the years..." —Washington Post Book World

"Gay Talese is a great writer of nonfiction--perhaps the best alive. Starting with the New York Times in 1956, he has composed unforgettable newspaper features, magazine stories, and books for five decades. So it's no surprise that Talese's long-awaited memoir, A Writer's Life, is completely absorbing--especially for professional writers, but for nonwriters also." —The Seattle Times

"Though Talese claims that he spends his days alone, 'producing prose with the ease of a patient passing kidney stones,' A Writer's Life arronges his stones in a setting that shines with the luster of gems. " — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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Thy Neighbor's Wife (1981)

"A report (the result of no less than nine years of work) on just how far some of us have willingly, gladly strayed not from nineteenth-century morality, but from the kind that most of the twentieth-century has taken for granted." —The New York Times Book Review

"A sexual Pilgrim's Progress...Few writers have lived so long, traveled so far, on the frontiers of the sexual revolution." —The Atlantic Monthly

"Talese does not proselytize, he informs...Readable and thoroughly entertaining." —Vogue

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The Kingdom and the Power (1969)

"Beguilingly gossipy, intimately anecdotal...a grand epic that personalizes the impersonal and turns monolith to flesh...Seldom has anyone been so successful in making a newspaper come alive as a human institution." —The New York Times

"Beautifully documented...No less than a landmark in the field of writing and journalism." —The Nation

"I know of no book about a great institution which is so detailed, so intensely personalized, or so dramatized as this volume about The New York Times." —The Christian Science Monitor

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The Bridge (1964)

"Mr. Talese has written a vivid, highly readable story of the building of the bridge. He has described movingly the people caught up in the project--the engineers, the workers, the displaced, and he sees the bridge as a human rather than a mechanical achievement...imparting drama and romance to this bridge-building story." —The New York Times Book Review

"This book has the charm of Max Miller's I Cover the Waterfront and the precision of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Only a writer in love with his subject could have produced so charming a narrative about a bridge. There are many stories within the story of The Bridge. All are worth reading." —Houston Post

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The Silent Season of a Hero (2010)

"Going through this collection of nearly 40 sports pieces, dating from 1948 to 2006 and reprinted mostly from The New York Times, readers should be forgiven if they forgot, or never knew, just how daring and original Talese's sports-writing efforts were in their day, his prose distinctive for its precision, its silkiness, its attention to important details that lesser journalists routinely overlooked, and its empathy for losers. Innovations aside, what's most impressive is how well these pieces still hold together, whether it's a group of vignettes on former boxing champ Floyd Patterson, an offbeat profile of referee Ruby Goldstein ("the loneliest guy in boxing"), a prophetic 1951 piece on one of the nation's earliest sports agents, and a look at a rare Yankees season (1979) on the road to nowhere. Good stuff from a guy who once described his style as 'the art of hanging out.'" —Booklist

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Unto the Sons (1992)

A New York Times Notable Book

"Reads like a good novel...As Talese meticulously reconstructs his family chronicle, a larger dramatic portrait of an entire region and way of life emerges." —The New York Times

"Unto the Sons is a triumph...Place and time are summoned directly and sensuously out of the memory of Gay Talese." —Chicago Tribune Book World

"An Italian Roots." —The Washington Post Book World

"This book gives all the pleasure one associates with reading a major novel." —Norman Mailer

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Honor Thy Father (1971)

"A marvelous piece of work, showing how a good journalist can catch a man just as he is ready to reconsider his past and is anxious to find someone who will listen...A book about a vanishing way of life in America: the Mafia." —Newsweek

"Mr. Talese's insight will do more to help us understand the criminal than any amount of moral recrimination." —The Times Literary Supplement

"An incredible job of reporting." —Mario Puzo

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Fame and Obscurity (1970)

"Talese is a masterful writer, whose seamless, thought-provoking prose carries the reader as effortlessly as a gondolier in a Venice canal." —San Diego Union-Tribune

"Talese has a cool understated style that inspires our confidence in its veracity, and possesses the ability to enter into his subjects' lives that make us see them from the inside the way a novelist does." —San Francisco Chronicle

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The Gay Talese Reader (2003)

"This stellar anthology reminds us that Talese's early work in Esquire raised the magazine article to the level of an art form...Each piece is marked by Talese's elegant style, exhaustive research, skilled use of dialogue, scene-by-scene construction and, above all, his unerring eye for the telling detail." —LA Times Book Review

"In this book you'll find some of the best American prose of the second half of the twentieth century......Buy this intelligently edited assemblage." —Atlantic Monthly

"What is striking is how self-effacing Mr. Talese can be, sketching in the telling detail without putting himself in the portrait-frame or pushing a theme with auteur-like emphasis." —Wall Street Journal

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