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Gay Talese is the bestselling author of eleven books. He was a reporter for the New York Times from 1956 to 1965, and since then he has written for the Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, 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."

His most recent book, A Writer's Life, was published by Knopf in 2006 and reissued in trade paperback by The Random House Publishing Group in July 2007.

works in progress*

Gay Talese is progressing with a new book for Knopf, based on his 50-year marriage. It's tentatively scheduled to be released in the fall of 2011.

Talese is writing updated material for inclusion in his reissued Thy Neighbor's Wife and Honor Thy Father, which HarperCollins will publish in early 2009 as part of its "Timeless Classic" series. The books will be edited by Daniel Halpern. Peter Hamill will write the introduction for Honor Thy Father and Naomi Wolf for Thy Neighbor's Wife.

Talese is co-writing with his former New York Times colleague Arthur Gelb a documentary on the paper, which will be produced by Scott Rudin.

Talese is assisting in the forthcoming series "Italians in America" that is being overseen by Jeff Bieber of WETA, the PBS affiliate station for Washington, D.C.

Talese is consulting with actor-director Stanley Tucci on the HBO series that will be based on Talese's 1992 bestseller for Knopf Unto the Sons.

*The above projects are handled by Talese's agent, Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

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A Writer's Life

The inner workings of a writer's life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now focuses on his own life — the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism and acclaim for his revelatory books. Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned — A Writer's Life is a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man's life, and of writing itself.

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other books by Gay Talese

In this century and the last, most of history's important news stories have been broken by The New York Times. In The Kingdom and the Power, former Times correspondent Gay Talese lays bare the secret internal intrigues at the daily, revealing the stories behind the personalities, rivalries, and scoops at the most influential paper in the world. Regarded as a classic piece of journalism, The Kingdom and the Power is as gripping as a work of fiction and as relevant as today's headlines.