Talk

Talk is a hilariously irreverent and racy testament to dialogue: the gossip, questioning, analysis, arguments, and revelations that make up our closest friendships. It’s the summer of 1965 and Emily, Vincent, and Marsha are at the beach. All three are ambitious and artistic; all are hovering around thirty; and all are deeply and mercilessly invested in analyzing themselves and everyone around them. The friends discuss sex, shrinks, psychedelics, sculpture, and S and M in an ongoing dialogue where anything goes and no topic is off limits. Talk is the result of these conversations, recorded by Linda Rosenkrantz and transformed into a novel whose form and content put it well ahead of its time. Controversial upon its first publication in 1968, Talk remains fresh, lascivious, and laugh-out-loud funny nearly fifty years later.

Linda Rosenkrantz is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction—including Telegram, a history of telegraphic communication and My Life as a List: 207 Things About My (Bronx) Childhood, a memoir—and is the co-author of Gone Hollywood: The Movie Colony in the Golden Age. A longtime syndicated columnist, she was the founding editor of Auction magazine, as well as a founder of the popular baby-­naming site Nameberry.com. Rosenkrantz was born and raised in New York City and currently lives in Los Angeles.

Stephen Koch is the author of two novels, Night Watch and The Bachelor’s Bride, and of several nonfiction works: Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World; Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzen­berg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles; and The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop. He lives in New York City, where he is the director of the Peter Hujar Archive.