DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Voyeur's Motel

Gay Talese author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press

Published:4th May '17

Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date

The Voyeur's Motel cover

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.

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 *

ISBN: 9781611855302

Dimensions: 4mm x 135mm x 20mm

Weight: 245g

240 pages

Main