The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes caustic, erudite, and joyful assessments of film, art, and literature. Whether he’s describing Tracy Emin or Andy Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder (“Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....”) or the installations of Barbara Kruger (“Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are…”), Indiana is never just describing. His writing is refreshing, erudite, joyful.
     Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath—in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way—about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it’s also political, plus it’s a riot of fun on the page.
    Here is Gary Indiana on Euro Disney resort park in Marne-la-Valée outside of Paris:

John Berger compares the art of Disney to that of Francis Bacon. He says that the same essential horror lurks in both, and that it springs from the viewer’s imagining: There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame.

With an introduction by Christian Lorentzen.

‍

"Since 1987, Indiana has published novels, nonfiction, plays, short stories — all with an unmistakable, sardonic voice embedded in the text…” —Los Angeles Times

"Indiana is viperous: he can strike fast, with a deadly venom apparent only once the laughter has subsided, or opt for slow constriction. "—Michael La Pointe, Times Literary Supplement

"Indiana’s reputation as mean is such an odd categorization for someone who is so capable of feeling the struggles of his subjects, to see their risk as his own."—Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum

"Throughout Fire Season, Indiana shows himself to be landscapist worthy of Bosch and a portraitist worthy of Francis Bacon: he paints with a rich palette of displeasures whose pigments range from the scatological to the refined. "—Ryan Ruby, New Left Review

Few writers are as keenly alive to absurdity or write with as sharp a pen as Gary Indiana, whose new essay collection, Fire Season...spans almost forty years of stellar criticism."--Jennifer Krasinsky, 4Columns

‍

‍