welcome
Gay Talese is a bestselling author who has written fourteen books. He was a reporter for the New York Times from 1956 to 1965, and since then he has written for the The New Yorker, Esquire, and other national publications.
Gay Talese was born in Ocean City, New Jersey, and currently lives in New York City. His groundbreaking article "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" was named the "best story Esquire ever published," and he was credited by Tom Wolfe with the creation of an inventive form of nonfiction writing called "The New Journalism."
from the photo archives
Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, June 5, 2017 ©Natan Dvir
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Gay Talese near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., February 2015, © Josh Haner/The New York Times
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Gay Talese with Tony Danza at the New York Athletic Club for Table 4 Writers Foundation, March 7, 2013, by Mike Coppola/Getty Images
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Gay Talese with Joe Girardi © New York Yankees, October 2012
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© Darryl Estrine, Cigar Aficionado, October 2012
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Attending Tony Bennett's concert at The Metropolitan Opera House, September 2011
© Jill Krementz
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Rome, May 2011
© Elisabetta A. Villa/Getty Images
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Reading in the Roman Forum before an audience of 1,000, May 2011
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Madrid, May 2011
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Moscow wiith the opera singer Marina Poplavskaya, the subject of his New Yorker profile, 2010
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new releases
High Notes
'High Notes' contains all the reasons I've been teaching Gay Talese's work to my students at Yale for a decade, and all the reasons they love it. There are scenes described in such vivid detail you feel you're standing inside them; peripheral characters whom only Talese would care about and who are far more interesting than the ones in the center; details that no other writer would notice because no one has Talese's eyes and Talese's ears. This is glorious journalism.—Anne Fadiman
Learn more here.
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| The Voyeur's Motel
From Grove Atlantic, available wherever books are sold
The Voyeur’s Motel is an extraordinary work of narrative journalism. It is at once an examination of one unsettling man and a portrait of the secret life of the American heartland over the latter half of the twentieth century.
Learn more here.
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other books by Gay Talese
High Notes (2017)
The Voyeur's Motel (2016)
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold Photos by Phil Stern (2015)
The Silent Season of a Hero (2010)
The Writer's Life (2006)
The Gay Talese Reader (2003)
The Bridge (revised and updated) (2003)
The Literature of Reality (with Barbara Lounsberry) (1996)
Unto the Sons (1992)
Thy Neighbor's Wife (1980)
Honor Thy Father (1971)
Fame and Obscurity (1970)
The Kingdom and the Power (1969)
The Overreachers (1965)
The Bridge (1964)
The Bridge (1964)
more...
works in progress*
2006 © Rafil Kroll-Zaidi
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A documentary featuring Gay Talese's reporting (entitled Voyeur)
was shown at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theatre on October 4th, as
part of the 55th annual New York Film Festival. The documentary team,
headed by Myles Kane and Josh Koury, based their work while trailing Talese
in and around Denver for two years while he interviewed the "world's greatest
voyeur," a motel owner named Gerald Foos, for a story that was excerpted
in 2016 by The New Yorker magazine and later published as a book by Grove
Atlantic. The Kane-Khoury documentary is available now on Netflix.
Gay Talese is progressing with a new book for Knopf, "A Non-Fiction Marriage,"
based on his half century marriage with Nan Talese,
an editor with her own imprint at Doubleday.
In 2017, a film based on Mr. Talese's profile on fighter Floyd Patterson
will go into production by Peter Newman.
*The above projects are handled by Talese's agent, Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit Associates (lynn.nesbit@janklow.com).
more news...
Click here for print quality images of Gay Talese
The Buenos Aires opera house where Poplavskaya performed, 2010
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Gay and Nan Talese in New York, 2009
© Mary Ellen Mark
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Talese at Yankee Stadium with former Yankee star Reggie Jackson, before the final game of the post-season Yankees-Detroit Tigers series. Talese's article on Yankees' manager Joe Girardi appeared in the September 24, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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With Yogi Berra in Montclair, New Jersey, 2002
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With Muhammad Ali in Havana, 1996
© Howard L. Bingham
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Gore Vidal, Gay Talese, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer read George Bernard Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell" in a one-night performance benefiting the Actor's Studio at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, February 15, 1993
© Christian Zibach
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As Don Juan at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, February 15, 1993
© Christian Zibach
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