The Voyeur's Motel

Description

On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. 'Since learning of your long awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America,' the letter began, 'I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.' The man went on to tell Talese a remarkable, shocking secret, so compelling that Talese travelled to Colorado to verify it in person. But because the letter-writer insisted on remaining anonymous, Talese filed his reporting away, certain the story would remain untold. Over the next thirty-five years, the man occasionally reached out to Talese to fill him in on the latest developments in his life, but he continued to insist on anonymity. Finally, after thirty-five years, he's ready to go public. In the tradition of Thy Neighbor's Wife, Talese's landmark, best-selling exploration of the sexual revolution in America, this will be a provocative, eye-opening and much-talked-about book.

Gay Talese is the bestselling author of twelve books, including Thy Neighbor's Wife, Unto the Sons and Honor Thy Father. He has written for numerous publications, including Esquire, The New Yorker, Newsweek and Harper's Magazine. Owing to these articles, Tom Wolfe credited Gay Talese with the creation of an inventive form of nonfiction writing called 'The New Journalism.' Talese lives with his wife, Nan, in New York City.

This book flipped nearly all of my switches as a reader. It's a strange, melancholy, morally complex, grainy, often appalling and sometimes bleakly funny book...You will often feel shabby while reading The Voyeur's Motel. You are meant to. It's an intense book that reminds us that a problem of being alive is seeing things you hate but are attracted to anyway. It's possible to admire it while wanting to pluck out your own prying eyes. * New York Times * The Voyeur's Motel is a weird, fascinating and thoroughly uncomfortable story built from layers of complicity...makes creepily fascinating reading. * Financial Times * it is by turns fascinating and illuminating, very creepy and very funny, and will live in my memory long after many more doggedly accurate works have vanished into thin air. -- Craig Brown * Mail on Sunday * The Voyeur's Motel took my breath away... This is a brilliant, exhilarating, and haunting book. -- Frank Rich The best non-fiction writer in America. -- Mario Puzo Talese's... prose is distinctive for its precision, its silkiness, its attention to important details that lesser journalists routinely overlooked. -- Alan Moore, author of WATCHMEN and V FOR VENDETTA The most important non-fiction writer of his generation, the person whose work most influenced at least two generations of other reporters. -- David Halberstam, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian First-rate... Well-told stories, their social message cumulative: a drastically transformed American sexuality has emerged during the past decades. * New York Times Book Review on THY NEIGHBOUR'S WIFE *