PW: How did The Gay Talese Reader come about?

Gay Talese: It was George Gibson's idea [publisher of Walker & Co.]. My books have been in paperback for years by Ballantine: Honor Thy Father, Thy Neighbor's Wife, The Kingdom and the Power. But eventually the license runs out, and things go out of print. I own the copyright to all my books. George Gibson called me and said he'd like to put out The Bridge, and then he suggested we do The Gay Talese Reader.

PW: How difficult was it for you to sit down and choose these pieces for the book?

GT: I didn't choose them; George Gibson did. All I did was send over things that I thought were collectible. George Gibson decided what would go in. And then they told me. I said fine. A piece I would have liked to have in there was the opening chapter of Thy Neighbor's Wife, but it didn't make it.

PW: One of your earliest books, The Bridge, was reprinted by Walker last year. That must be satisfying for an author.

GT: It certainly is. I wrote that it in 1964. It's very satisfying. It confirms, for me, that if you take a lot of time and you care about language, than you can make something readable and enjoyable even if it is no longer topical. It's not so much who or what you're writing about, but how you do it. It's like fiction—it's how you write the story that is interesting.

PW: Your new book will be published by Knopf?

GT: Yes. I owe them a book.

PW: Your Frank Sinatra piece, reprinted here, was recently selected by Esquire as the greatest story in the magazine's history. Is it the piece that you're most proud of?

GT: No. I think it's one of the best. When I was writing magazine pieces in the 1960s, I felt that I had done other articles that were just as accomplished as that. And decades later, when I was much older and hadn't done a magazine piece in years, I wrote a piece about Muhammad Ali meeting Fidel Castro for the first time that had many of the same challenges of the Sinatra piece, in that the principal character wouldn't or couldn't talk. For the magazine writer, the challenges of the story were similar. It's like being asked, "Of all of your children who is your favorite child?" You give your best to every piece, you know you've done your best and that's the end of it. I was gratified to have the Sinatra piece chosen by the Esquire editors, none of whom I know.

PW: How do you think that New Journalism, which you've been credited by some with creating, changed journalism?

GT: I don't like that term. I admire Tom Wolfe, who created that term. But that is a term that caught on with college professors and came into vogue. What I did was not new. I was getting my inspiration from fiction writers like John Cheever, John O'Hara and Irwin Shaw. New Journalism came to represent to me and others the kind of writing designed to get attention. There were a lot of imitators that would not spend three or four months on the road researching a story. New Journalism represented sloppiness. Some of those people were making it up. If you do that, then write fiction.

PW: Your next book is one that you've been working on for the last nine years. What is it about?

GT: In 1993 my last book, Unto the Sons, came out. That book is the story of my father and his family. It's the immigrant story, the coming-to-America story. In this book, I just tried to do the second half of that book. It takes place from the 1950s to the new century. This book is about the writer's mind.

PW: What's the title?

GT: I can't tell you because I don't have one. I'm trying to get it done by December or January and have it published next year.