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Who

Talese is the head of Nan A. Talese, a literary imprint under the Knopf Doubleday umbrella. As the publisher of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, she was memorably slapped (metaphorically, of course) by Oprah on live TV. Her husband is Gay Talese.

Backstory

Talese (née Nan Ahern) has been moving in elite literary circles for half a century. After graduating Manhattanville College in 1955, she worked at Vogue and started dating the soon-to-be famous journo Gay Talese. (They married in '59.) She transitioned to publishing with a job at Random House, moved on to Simon & Schuster, then landed at Houghton Mifflin as executive editor in 1981. In 1988 she joined Doubleday as senior vice president; two years later Steve Rubin, Doubleday's then-president and publisher, gave Talese her own imprint. In December '08, as part of mass restructuring at Random House, Talese's imprint became part of the Knopf division headed by Sonny Mehta.

Over the years, Talese has edited and/or published books by a long line of lit stars, including Pat Conroy, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Barry Unsworth, Alex Kotlotwitz, Thomas Cahill, Antonia Fraser, Peter Ackroyd, George Plimpton, Jennifer Egan, Paul Newman, Mia Farrow, Gus Van Sant, Adam Haslett, and Nicole Krauss. One of the industry's most respected figures, she inspires unusual loyalty: A number of authors, such as Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, have dutifully followed her from publisher to publisher.

Scandal

Talese's rep was slightly tarnished in 2006 following the disclosure that James Frey had fabricated many of the details in his best-selling "memoir," A Million Little Pieces. More embarrassing that the revelation itself, though, was her appearance on Oprah. The talk show queen, of course, had picked Frey's memoir for her club, and she took the publisher to public task about what she knew and when she knew it. Talese, who's insisted that she was "tricked" into appearing on the show, had difficulty mustering much of an explanation, and Oprah's bitch slap—or "public stoning," as Talese described it—made her look foolish and clueless. (As if Talese's televised evisceration wasn't sufficiently humiliating, her cell phone went off during the interview.) She later described Oprah's behavior as "mean and self-serving...fiercely bad manners."

Personal

The Taleses live in a five-story townhouse on East 61st Street (which Jay McInerney used as a setting in his 2006 novel The Good Life) and spend weekends at their home in Ocean City, New Jersey, Gay's hometown. They have two daughters—Pamela is an artist and Catherine is a photo editor at GQ—who will presumably be cringing more than the rest of us when Gay publishes his memoir about the couple's open marriage, which he's said to be currently working on.