Il ritratto cristallino di Frank Sinatra di Gay Talese combinava fatti fedeli con una narrazione vivida in un trionfo del New Journalism. Ora viene pubblicato insieme a note e corrispondenza provenienti dagli archivi dell'autore e alle fotografie di Phil Stern, l'unico fotografo che poté avvicinarsi a Sinatra in uno straordinario periodo di quattro decenni.

Taschen ripubblica quest'opera con un'introduzione di Talese e riproduzioni delle sue pagine manoscritte e della sua corrispondenza, accompagnate dagli scatti del leggendario obiettivo di Phil Stern, l'unico fotografo che abbia seguito Sinatra per quattro decenni, nonché di altri celebri fotoreporter degli anni Sessanta come John Bryson, John Dominis e Terry O'Neil. Il risultato dell'inchiesta di Talese è un ritratto nitido di Sinatra - tra lo studio di registrazione, il palco, la città e l'eponimo raffreddore -, rivelatorio tanto della psiche della singola star quanto del funzionamento dell'intera macchina di Hollywood.

È il 7 gennaio del 1980 quando Gay Talese, all'epoca impegnato nell'imminente pubblicazione del suo bestseller "La donna d'altri", riceve una lettera scritta a mano e anonima. Il mittente è un uomo del Colorado, che dice di aver «appreso del suo attesissimo studio sul sesso in America» e «di poter contribuire con alcune importanti informazioni». Nel seguito di quella lettera l'autore rivela a Talese qualcosa di inconfessabile: alla fine degli anni Sessanta ha acquistato il Manor House Motel, alla periferia di Denver, per soddisfare le proprie tendenze voyeuristiche. Sotto il tetto della struttura ha costruito una «piattaforma d'osservazione», e da lì, attraverso dei finti condotti di ventilazione, da anni osserva gli ospiti ignari. Talese, incuriosito e intenzionato a scriverne, incontra l'uomo - Gerald Foos - in Colorado qualche settimana dopo, e visita il motel. Foos, però, dichiara di voler rimanere anonimo, il giornalista non accetta e decide che questa storia non sarà raccontata. Passano degli anni, Talese rimane in contatto con Foos, che gli invia pagine e pagine del suo Diario del Voyeur, un registro in cui ha annotato le abitudini, i vizi, le passioni dei suoi ospiti - coppie sposate, amanti occasionali, omosessuali, vedove, escort, e tanti altri - pensando a sé come a un pioniere della ricerca sul sesso. Quello che ne risulta è uno spaccato della sessualità in America tra gli anni Settanta e i Novanta, l'istantanea di una nazione che sta vivendo gli aspri effetti della guerra in Vietnam, i giorni della Rivoluzione Sessuale, della desegregazione. Oggi, dopo oltre tr

Nel 1971 prima del "Padrino" e molto prima dei "Soprano", un libro reportage svelava al mondo i segreti meglio custoditi dall'Onorata Società americana. La storia ha inizio in una sera piovosa dell'ottobre 1964, quando Joseph "Bananas" Bonanno, boss della mafia newyorkese, viene rapito a ParkAvenue. La sua misteriosa ricomparsa, un anno e mezzo più tardi, segna l'inizio della "BananaWar", uno dei più feroci regolamenti di conti nella storia americana di Cosa Nostra. Gay Talese all'epoca ha trentadue anni e scrive per il "New York Times". Riesce a guadagnarsi la fiducia di Bill Bonanno, il figlio del padrino, e diventa una sorta di biografo autorizzato della più potente famiglia mafiosa statunitense. Da quella posizione di osservatore privilegiato segue la lotta di potere che squassa la Cupola americana tra gli anni Sessanta e Settanta. Nasce così "Onora il padre", che oggi torna in libreria con un testo in cui l'autore rivela retroscena mai divulgati dell'inchiesta più sensazionale della sua vita e racconta com'è andata a finire, quarantanni dopo.

Una sfrontata fotografia dell'erotismo d'oltreoceano, un viaggio attraverso le tappe dell'emancipazione sessuale, e sociale, di una nazione. Un'inchiesta dai toni provocatori che racconta la storia di uomini e donne che fecero degli Stati Uniti la patria di "Playboy" e "Screw", delle comuni di fine Ottocento e degli hippy, del rapporto Kinsey sul comportamento sessuale degli americani e di "Gola profonda", il primo film pornografico a raggiungere con successo il grande pubblico. Con lo zelo documentario di un giornalista d'assalto, Gay Talese vagliò migliaia di fonti, intervistò scambisti e onanisti e visitò di persona club nudisti e centri massaggi, provocando un clamore che fece del libro un best seller eccezionale. Oggi "La donna d'altri" torna in libreria in un'edizione aggiornata, dove la prosa attenta e lo sguardo limpido di Talese offrono un'inattesa ventata di irriverenza e franchezza, un punto di vista inedito su tabù con cui non abbiamo mai smesso davvero di confrontarci. Postfazione di Walter Siti.

Oltre cinquant'anni di incontri, interviste eccellenti, personalità che hanno fatto la storia: Gay Talese ha scritto vere pietre miliari della letteratura americana. Questo libro raccoglie i suoi lavori migliori: dal ritratto di Frank Sinatra che, uscito nel '66 su "Esquire", è ancora oggi considerato uno dei migliori profili di una celebrità mai scritto, al pezzo su Joe Di Maggio nel periodo del matrimonio con Marilyn Monroe. E poi Muhammad Ali che incontra Fidel Castro all'Havana nel 1996, un trentunenne Peter O'Toole reduce dal successo di Lawrence d'Arabia e una serie di personaggi minori - sarti calabresi, boxeur in pensione, l'addetto ai necrologi del "Times" - tutti immortalati nella scrittura scintillante del principe del giornalismo americano.

LA MUJER DE TU PROJIMO - TALESE GAY - Random Spagna

A classic masterwork newly updated

The electrifying true story of the rise and fall of New York's notorious Bonanno crime family

On New York's Park Avenue on a rainy Tuesday night in October 1964, the famous Mafia chieftain Joseph Bonanno was kidnapped by two mobsters and reported by the police as dead on the following morning. More than a year later, Bonanno mysteriously reappeared, setting off a bloody mob feud that came to be known as the ?Banana War.?

In this monumental work—packed with intimate details and brilliant reporting—bestselling author Gay Talese first brought to the American consciousness a world and a life previously known to only a few. No other book has done more to acquaint readers with the secrets, structure, wars, power plays, family lives, and fascinating, frightening personalities of the Mafia.

The provocative classic work newly updated

An intimate personal odyssey across America's changing sexual landscape

When first published, Gay Talese's 1981 groundbreaking work, Thy Neighbor's Wife, shocked a nation with its powerful, eye-opening revelations about the sexual activities and proclivities of the American public in the era before AIDS. A marvel of journalistic courage and craft, the book opened a window into a new world built on a new moral foundation, carrying the reader on a remarkable journey from the Playboy Mansion to the Supreme Court, to the backyards and bedrooms of suburbia—through the development of the porn industry, the rise of the "swinger" culture, the legal fight to define obscenity, and the daily sex lives of "ordinary" people. It is the book that forever changed the way Americans look at themselves and one another.

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 best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power), the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor's Wife), and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience (Unto the Sons).

How has Talese found his subjects? What has stimulated, blocked, or inspired his writing? Here are his amateur beginnings on his college newspaper; his professional climb at The New York Times; his desire to write on a larger canvas, which led him to magazine writing at Esquire and then to books. We see his involvement with issues of race from his student days in the Deep South to a recent interracial wedding in Selma, Alabama, where he once covered the fierce struggle for civil rights. Here are his reflections on the changing American sexual mores he has written about over the last fifty years, and a striking look at the lives—and their meaning—of Lorena and John Bobbitt. He takes us behind the scenes of his legendary profile of Frank Sinatra, his writings about Joe DiMaggio and heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, and his interview with the head of a Mafia family.

But he is at his most poignant in talking about the ordinary men and women whose stories led to his most memorable work. In remarkable fashion, he traces the history of a single restaurant location in New York, creating an ethnic mosaic of one restaurateur after the other whose dreams were dashed while a successor's were born. And as he delves into the life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his consuming interest in the world in its latest manifestation.

In these and other recollections and stories, Talese gives us a fascinating picture of both the serendipity and meticulousness involved in getting a story. He makes clear that every one of us represents a good one, if a writer has the curiosity to know it, the diligence to pursue it, and the desire to get it right.

Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned—a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man's life, and of writing itself.


From the Hardcover edition.

The former reporter and best-selling author of Unto the Sons journeys behind the scenes of the world's most powerful newspaper to examine the public and private lives of the paper's founders, the power struggles and intrigues that nearly destroyed it, and the turnaround that led it to new success and influence. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

€ 17,90

Spanning more than 100 years, New York: 365 Days is a spectacular collection of then-and-now photographs that capture the rhythms and moods of the greatest city in the world. Selected from the vast archive of The New York Times, the extraordinary images in this book include many rarely-seen moments, with stops at famous landmarks and memorable events as well as a dizzying array of evocative everyday New York scenes. Featuring an introduction by bestselling New York writer Gay Talese, New York: 365 Days offers a portrait of Gotham that natives and visitors alike will find riveting. Spanning more than 100 years, New York: 365 Days is a spectacular collection of then-and-now photographs that capture the rhythms and moods of the greatest city in the world. Selected from the vast archive of The New York Times, the extraordinary images in this book include many rarely-seen moments, with stops at famous landmarks and memorable events as well as a dizzying array of evocative everyday New York scenes. Featuring an introduction by bestselling New York writer Gay Talese, New York: 365 Days offers a portrait of Gotham that natives and visitors alike will find riveting.

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 best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power), the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor's Wife), and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience (Unto the Sons).

How has Talese found his subjects? What has stimulated, blocked, or inspired his writing? Here are his amateur beginnings on his college newspaper; his professional climb at The New York Times; his desire to write on a larger canvas, which led him to magazine writing at Esquire and then to books. We see his involvement with issues of race from his student days in the Deep South to a recent interracial wedding in Selma, Alabama, where he once covered the fierce struggle for civil rights. Here are his reflections on the changing American sexual mores he has written about over the last fifty years, and a striking look at the lives—and their meaning—of Lorena and John Bobbitt. He takes us behind the scenes of his legendary profile of Frank Sinatra, his writings about Joe DiMaggio and heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, and his interview with the head of a Mafia family.

But he is at his most poignant in talking about the ordinary men and women whose stories led to his most memorable work. In remarkable fashion, he traces the history of a single restaurant location in New York, creating an ethnic mosaic of one restaurateur after the other whose dreams were dashed while a successor's were born. And as he delves into the life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his consuming interest in the world in its latest manifestation.

In these and other recollections and stories, Talese gives us a fascinating picture of both the serendipity and meticulousness involved in getting a story. He makes clear that every one of us represents a good one, if a writer has the curiosity to know it, the diligence to pursue it, and the desire to get it right.

Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned—a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man's life, and of writing itself.

"An Italian ROOTS." The Washington Post Book World
At long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new.


From the Paperback edition.

"An Italian ROOTS." The Washington Post Book World
At long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new.


From the Paperback edition.

"Engrossing and provocative." Library Journal

Bestselling author Gay Talese's exploration into the hidden and changing sex lives of Americans from all walks of life shocked the world when it was first published in 1981. Now considered a classic, this fascinating personal oddysey and revealing public reflection on American sexuality changed the way Americans looked at themselves and one another.


From the Paperback edition.

"Fascinating . . . Poignant." The Wall Street Journal

In this extraordinary work of insight and interviews, bestselling author Gay Talese shares with us the lives of those we don't know and those we might wish we did: Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Manhattan mobsters, Bowery bums, and many others -- fascinating men and women who define our country's spirit and lead us to an understanding of ourselves as a nation.


From the Paperback edition.

"Brilliant . . . Indispensable." Los Angeles Times

Here is the story of the rise and fall of the notorious Bonanno crime family of New York as only best-selling author Gay Talese could tell it.