Talk

Friendships are built on chatter, on gossip, on revelations—on talk. Over the course of the summer of 1965, Linda Rosenkrantz taped conversations between three friends (two straight, one gay) on the cusp of thirty vacationing at the beach: Emily, an actor; Vince, a painter; and Marsha, a writer. The result was Talk, a novel in dialogue. The friends are ambitious, conflicted, jealous, petty, loving, funny, sex- and shrink-obsessed, and there’s nothing they won’t discuss. Topics covered include LSD, fathers, exes, lovers, abortions, S&M, sculpture, books, cats, and of course, each other.

Talk was ahead of its time in recognizing the fascination and significance of nonfamily ties in contemporary life. It may be almost fifty years since Emily, Vince, and Marsha spent the season in East Hampton, but they wouldn’t be out of place on the set of Girls or in the pages of a novel like Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?

Linda Rosenkrantz is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, includingTelegram, a history of the telegraphic communication, and her memoir, My Life as a List: 207 Things About My (Bronx) Childhood, and the co-author ofGone Hollywood: The Movie Colony in the Golden Age. She was also the founding editor ofAuction magazine, a long-time syndicated columnist, and a founder of the popular baby-naming site Nameberry.com. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

Stephen Koch taught writing at the School of the Arts at Columbia University and at Princeton University for over 30 years. He is the author of the novelsNight Watch and The Bachelor’s Bride, and several nonfiction works, The Modern Library Writer's Workshop,Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals. Koch lives in New York City, where he is the director of the Peter Hujar Archive.