The Lives They're Living

Jonathan Coleman on Nan and Gay Talese


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Jonathan Coleman's books include AT MOTHER'S REQUEST: A True Story of Money, Murder, and Betrayal (which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award, and was made into a CBS miniseries); EXIT THE RAINMAKER; LONG WAY TO GO: Black and White in America;  and a collaboration with basketball icon and NBA logo Jerry West, WEST BY WEST: My Charmed, Tormented Life. 

 

He began his career in London on Ian Hamilton's legendary journal The New Review, became a book editor at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, then worked as a journalist for CBS News. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications, and is a contributing editor of The Sunday Long Read. He is also an award-winning voiceover talent and recently narrated the audiobook of Ken Auletta's HOLLYWOOD ENDING: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence. For many years, he taught narrative nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia.

Jonathan's essay on Jerry West, from The Hedgehog Review.


Aaron Latham's 1973 New York Magazine piece on Gay.

"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," by Gay Talese, originally published in 1966 in Esquire.

"Your moment of Nan Talese" source is a Library of America conversation with her author Margaret Atwood. 

Photo is of the Taleses' wedding day in Rome, 1959. Credit: Elio Cardone.

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The Lives They're LivingBy Ben Yagoda