Our friends over at Creative Nonfiction, a wonderful on and offline outlet that focuses on memoir, literary journalism, and personal essays, have a new issue out paying tribute to two nonfiction lions, Norman Mailer and Gay Talese (his Six-Word Memoir: “Friendship test: willing to be inconvenienced”). The issue also debuts a column by Heidi Julavits called “miserablish,” and it will surely be smart and sly and wry, and the opposite of whatever that word “miserablish” might mean. Subscribe to CNF and/or order the most recent issue.

Talese must be in the air. Over coffee with my friend Lawrence Levi a few weeks back, he said, apropos of nothing and with uncharacteristic animation, “You have to read Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” Lawrence explained that it was reissued last year, “and it’s an examination of sexuality in America from the pre-Playboy days to the early eighties beginning of AIDS.” I’m about a third of the way into TNW and it’s incredible as advertised. In other words: it’s by Gay Talese.

Plus: Today’s the last day for bloggers, or friends and fans of bloggers, to submit narrative blog posts to reprint in the Winter issue of CNF. Posts that can stand alone, 2,000 words max, from 2010. Something from your own blog, from a friend’s blog, from a stranger’s blog. Enter here.