Gary Indiana

Danny, que a veces se hace llamar Mark, lleva varias vidas a un tiempo. Es estudiante de arquitectura, pero también trabaja como camarero en el Emerson Club, frecuentado por literatos en la cresta de la ola, y cuando necesita dinero alquila su cuerpo sin el menor reparo. A hombres, a mujeres, y a cualquiera que pueda pagarlo. Hasta que un día su amigo Chip, compañero de correrías y en ocasiones de cama, buscavidas y también chapero, y del que muy bien se podría decir que piensa con la polla (ya que, según Danny, ésta es el único órgano verdaderamente inteligente de su amigo), le conduce hasta una pandilla de peligrosos marginales: el doctor Crashnitz, un médico psicópata experto en la compra, la venta y hasta el robo de órganos para trasplantes; Stanley, un matón a su servicio que parece un gángster salido de una película de serie B, y Mavis, su voluptuosa asistente, para quien follar en la puerta de entrada no es más que una manera de decir «hola»... Y la novela de la vida de Danny, que hasta entonces transcurría como una mordaz, ingeniosa y aguda comedia de costumbres, se convertirá gradualmente en una sangrienta crónica negra. O, como opina el propio Danny de las novelas de una asidua del Club Emerson, en algo muy parecido a una partida de Scrabble con el Marqués de Sade...

Un periodista neoyorquino acude a Los Çngeles para escribir un artículo sobre una estrella de cine y para asistir al escabroso juicio de los hermanos Martínez, cuya historia ha conmocionado al país: asesinaron a tiros a sus padres en su mansion de Beverly Hills y se entregaron a una orgia de compras compulsivas antes de confesar el crimen a su psiquiatra. ¿Los asesinaron por pura codicia? ¿O es cierto que su padre los habia convertido en sus juguetes sexuales desde muy temprana edad? Una novela salvaje, entre la carcajada y el horror.

Footloose and broke, the unnamed narrator of Gone Tomorrow hops on a plane without asking questions when his director friend offers him a role in an art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogota, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grosvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than in shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the beautiful, nymph-like Michael Simard doesnt seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the films shady financier is sleeping with his mother, while a serial killer skulks about the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration begins in nearby Cali. But once the fiesta is over, all thats left are ghostly memories and the narrators 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. Its a philosophical work devised by a writer whos 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.

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 workfrom his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the postsummer-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 thishis most personal book yetthe 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.

In the summer of 1962, Andy Warhol unveiled 32 Soup Cans in his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles -- and sent the art world reeling. The responses ran from incredulity to outrage; the poet Taylor Mead described the exhibition as "a brilliant slap in the face to America." The exhibition put Warhol on the map -- and transformed American culture forever. Almost single-handedly, Warhol collapsed the centuries-old distinction between "high" and "low" culture, and created a new and radically modern aesthetic. In Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World, the dazzlingly versatile critic Gary Indiana tells the story of the genesis and impact of this iconic work of art. With energy, wit, and tremendous perspicacity, Indiana recovers the exhilaration and controversy of the Pop Art Revolution and the brilliant, tormented, and profoundly narcissistic figure at its vanguard.

Gary Indiana is one of Americas leading cultural critics -- a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopias Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer. His writings range from popular culture -- trash novels, architectural wonders and horrors -- to appreciations of the best of modern literature, art, and cinema. They include his convincing (and highly entertaining) debunking of fashionable conspiracy theories, a spirited and contrarian defense of Bill Clintons autobiography, a Mencken-like examination of the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the politics of celebrity in what Indiana calls the Age of Contempt. A postmodern Emerson, Indiana wields scalpel-sharp wit and a fealty to logic on issues in which, all too often, irrationalism and emotionalism hold sway. At times rigorously serious, at other times whimsical, Indianas most conspicuous feature is skepticism -- his wildly satirical contempt for conventional wisdom.

"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.

A beloved memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literaturewhose graphic, funny, and caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. "[Indiana] becomes the connective tissue that binds together a diaspora of subcultures: the beatnik-era experimental writing and happenings of downtown New York, the 1960s co-opted counterculture gone awry, the punk movement that followed, and the art and intellectual circles of the Reagan 80s, when the AIDS crisis was wiping out a generation of young gay men like him." Los Angeles Times 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 workfrom his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the postsummer-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 thishis most personal bookthe 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.

A dark yet compassionate comedy of art aspirations and friendships come to naught.First published in 2003, Gary Indianas 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 friendsmany of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worldswho 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 Indianas 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.

One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche. The Guardian The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature.Whether hes 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. 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 grace when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breathin the same discerning, insolent, eloquent wayabout high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, its also political, plus its a riot of fun on the page.Here is Gary Indiana on Euro Disney resort park in Marne-la-Valee 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 viewers imagining: There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame.