Gary Indiana – författare

With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work - from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he lived and worked occasionally over the past decades. Connoisseurs will recognize in this - his most personal book - the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of the most brilliant critics writing in America today, Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work-from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this-his most personal book yet-the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing.Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of “the most brilliant critics writing in America today,” Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.  With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post–summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book yet—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

The first novel from Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy tells the story of a 35 year-old writer for a New York arts and culture magazine whose life melts into a fever dream when he falls in love with handsome, charming, possibly heroin-addicted, and almost certainly insane Gregory Burgess. In the derelict brownstones of the Lower East Side in the late eighties, among the coked-out restauranteurs and art world impresarios of the supposed 'downtown scene,' the narrator wanders through the fog of passion. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic is spreading through the city, and New York friendships sputter to an end.

"This story, if it is one, deserves the closure of a suicide, perhaps even the magisterial finality of what is usually called a novel, but the remnants of that faraway time offer nothing more than a taste of damp ashes, a feeling of indeterminacy, and the obdurate inconclusiveness of passing time." So writes the unnamed narrator of Horse Crazy, looking back on a season of madness and desire. The first novel from the brilliant, protean Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old writer for a New York arts and culture magazine whose life melts into a fever dream when he falls in love with the handsome, charming, possibly heroin-addicted, and almost certainly insane Gregory Burgess. In the derelict brownstones of the Lower East Side in the late eighties, among the coked out restauranteurs and art world impresarios of the supposed "downtown scene," the narrator wanders through the fog of passion. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic is spreading through the city, and New York friendships sputter to an end. Here is a novel where the only moral is that thwarted passion is the truest passion, where love is a hallucination and the gravest illness is desire.

The narrator of Gone Tomorrow is an actor who has been cast in an unlikely art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogota, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director seems more interested in manipulating his cast than shooting film. The cult star is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. Meanwhile, the film's shady financier appears to be sleeping with his mother, and a serial killer is skulking around the area killing tourists.

The narrator of Gone Tomorrow is an actor who has been cast in an unlikely art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogotá, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death for no apparent reason, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grasvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the incomparably beautiful Michael Simard doesn''t seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film''s shady financier appears to be sleeping with his mother, and a serial killer is skulking around the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration comes to nearby Cali. But once the fiesta comes to an end, all that''s left is the memory and the narrator''s insistence on telling the tale. "Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels," writes Dennis Cooper, "Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It''s a philosophical work devised by a writer who''s both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life."

A dark yet compassionate comedy of art aspirations and friendships come to naught.First published in 2003, Gary Indiana’s turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene. During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends—many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds—who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.Arguably Indiana’s most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.

Whether he's describing Tracy Emin or 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. 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.

Beneath the extreme, taboo-breaking surface of ''Salo'' (a controversial and scandalous film made in 1975), Gary Indiana argues that there''s a deeply penetrating account of human behaviour which resonates as an account of fascism and as a picture of the corporate world we live in. ''Salo'' was Pier Pasolini''s last film (he was murdered shortly after completing it). An adaptation of Sade''s vicious masterpiece, it is an unflinching, violent portrayal of sexual cruelty which many find too disturbing to watch.

Beneath the extreme, taboo-breaking surface of ''Salo'' (a controversial and scandalous film made in 1975), Gary Indiana argues that there''s a deeply penetrating account of human behaviour which resonates as an account of fascism and as a picture of the corporate world we live in. ''Salo'' was Pier Pasolini''s last film (he was murdered shortly after completing it). An adaptation of Sade''s vicious masterpiece, it is an unflinching, violent portrayal of sexual cruelty which many find too disturbing to watch.

A collaboration between Louise Bourgeois and Gary Indiana pairs her beautiful colour-wash male and female torso images with his wordpoems, creating a meditation on relationships, sexuality and physicality. To Whom It May Concern is one of the final projects Louise Bourgeois completed, and is an apt demonstration of the enduring power of her work. Rich pinks, purples, reds and blues describe bodies comprising swollen bellies, heavy breasts, engorged phalluses and stooped torsos are presented in a series of pairings on facing pages. Deceptively simple in design, the varying intensity and range of colour within each figure reveals a dynamism in each repeated coupling of these headless, limbless bodies: male and female at their essential, and the relationship between the two, changing but the same. Indiana’s short, visceral but lyrical texts are interspersed throughout and form a conversation with these images, an unconventional non-narrative, part of a broader dialogue about the barrier of flesh, about desire and intimacy. This Violette Editions publication, developed in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, faithfully reproduces in reduced size the original large-format artists’ book, made in fabric in an edition of seven.

From the California recall circus, in which Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt, and Arianna Huffington vied with over one hundred other candidates to replace a supposedly inept governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger emerged triumphant. How did this onetime bodybuilding champion and gay pinup, with no political experience and a string of mediocre action movies to his name, come to take over the world’s fifth-largest economy?In The Schwarzenegger Syndrome, celebrated journalist and novelist Gary Indiana makes the case that this tale is a product of a mediasoaked culture in which image matters more than substance. The recall process, a parody of direct democracy, gave Schwarzenegger the chance of a lifetime. With so many candidates in the race, he certainly wasn’t the most qualified, the most articulate, or the most credible—but he was the most famous. And for the majority of Californians, that was enough. A witty and biting travelogue through the intersection of celebrity culture with American political life, The Schwarzenegger Syndrome lays bare the dark implications of Schwarzenegger’s rise to power in the Golden State.