Pamela talese

Catherine talese
Nan Talese is a retired American editor, and a veteran of the New York publishing industry.
Nan Talese, arbiter of her own imprint at Knopf Doubleday, loves books.

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BIO Honors Nan A. Talese

Biographers International Organization will present its third annual Editorial Excellence Award to the legendary editor Nan A. Talese, senior vice president of Doubleday and publisher and editorial director of her own imprint, Nan A. Talese Books at Doubleday, at an evening reception on October 5 in New York City.

In the course of fifty years, Nan Talese has edited and published some of the most distinguished biographiess and nonfiction works of our time, including A. Alvarez’s enduring classic, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide; Thomas Kenneally’s Schindler’s List; Phyllis Rose’s Josephine Baker in Her Time; François Gilot’s Matisse and Picasso; Benita Eisler’s O’Keeffe and Stieglitz; Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette; many books by Peter Ackroyd, including The Life of Thomas More,Shakespeare, Chaucer, J. M. W. Turner, Newton, Poe, Chaplin, and London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets; and Deirdre Bair’s Saul Steinberg and the forthcoming Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend, among many others. We spoke wi

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Interview With a Gatekeeper: Nan Talese

Nan Talese, arbiter of her own imprint at Knopf Doubleday, loves books. And when she’s enthusiastic about one, she will publish it, despite an almost unfavorable profit and loss analysis. Her sweet but persistent approach to almost everything is rooted in her Texan heritage and her New York upbringing, a fierce combination that grants her an uncompromising approach to the written word. But her generosity exceeds her unflappability. We talk for three hours under the shade of old trees at her simple, rural Connecticut home, a place she prefers to be much of the time, a place she bought without telling her husband, the writer Gay Talese. “Would you like to borrow a bathing suit?” she asks, pointing to her pool while her dogs bark at the tractor grading the driveway of the Episcopal Church next door. After my interview, I leave with an armful of books she insists I read and plans to get together again, as we are neighbors in this close-knit town.

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Kerri Arsenault: How did you come to editing?

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At 83, Nan Talese might just be the new image of having it all. She’s dressed in a black sweater, cozy black pants, and black ballet slippers, girlishly ensconced on her tufted leather couch with a manuscript she’s considering for publication by her imprint at Doubleday. She’s looking rather adoringly at her husband, Gay Talese—best-selling author, iconic charmer—who’s emerged from the top floor of their town house, in a three-piece bespoke suit as per usual, and is already commanding the room. The subject is the original residents of the house, on East 61st Street, a cast of characters that brings to mind a Billy Wilder movie. They included model Hope Bryce (with her blind dog), who was having an affair with director Otto Preminger. “I’d see Mr. Preminger sneaking in and out,” says Gay, at 85 still razor-sharp. There was an airline stewardess who “went on a flight, leaving her goddamn toaster on . . . and it burned the goddamn fourth floor enough that they kicked her out.” And don’t forget Lucile Lawrence, the ex-wife of world-renowned harpist Carlos Salzedo, “the most famous tea