Gary Indiana

"A mysterious bout of narcolepsy has overtaken the seaside hamlet of Land's End, a funk endemic to the region since the wreckage a century earlier of the ship 'The Ardent Sodomite'. Meanwhile, Inspector Weymouth Smith and unconvinced cohort Dr. Obregon Petrie attempt to thwart Fu Manchu's latest ploy for world domination while confronting South American piyas, matching wits with a clubfooted ex-STASI, as well as battling the latest technological crazes and their own drug dependencies."

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.

"One of America's leading critics, Gary Indiana has written essays on nearly every aspect of American culture. Utopia's Debris comprises selections of his very best work from the past fifteen years, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer."--BOOK JACKET.

A brilliant, satiric novel about the waning of cool in downtown New York. This comic novel follows the various declines and concessions of a number of characters at crossroads in their lives. The dispersion of their friends and loved ones causes an emotional undertow, hauntingly captured in Indiana's best novel yet.

"Gary Indiana brings us a novel fueled by the virtuoso con artist Evangeline Slote and her extravagant life of chicanery and petty crime. She thrives on seduction, manipulation, and the humiliation of everybody in her orbit. And she has a genius for generating chaos and panic among her real and imaginary enemies.". "Until her conviction on slavery charges brought against her by several ungrateful Mexican housemaids, Evangeline, a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor, lives in perpetual motion. She and her husband, Warren, a self-made real estate mogul at the end of a long alcoholic decline, breezily shift from Las Vegas to Hawaii to Nassau, torching their homes for insurance money, dabbling in myriad forms of financial fraud, and constantly altering their identities to evade the law.". "When Warren dies, Evangeline is desperate to jump-start yet another new life, bankrolled by Warren's far-flung and hard-to-locate assets, while keeping his death secret from the world at large, but particularly from his "former children," her stepchildren and the beneficiaries of his will. Fortunately, she has an eager accomplice in Devin, her fanatically devoted and easily manipulated son.". "Surrounded by a cohort of burnouts, hapless suckers, and fellow grifters, Evangeline cooks up the ultimate con. To complete the intricate scheme, she will stop at nothing, including murder."--BOOK JACKET.

Gary Indiana's savage comedy of manners opens with a grisly, intimate double murder and quickly fans out through the boulevards and freeways of a twilight world where self-mutilation is an art form and casual sex easily blurs into casual killing: a world where resentment lies at the root of everything. Resentment chronicles a murder trial that might have been dreamed by Lewis Carroll, simultaneously tracking the damaged yet strangely charmed lives of an embittered journalist, a drive-time radio DJ, a stalking victim and her movie star husband, a taxi driver with AIDS, and a burnt-out soap opera actress and her mentally unbalanced son. A multitextured probe of both public spectacle and private catastrophes, Resentment startles us with flashes from an epic judicial battle and its sway over our collective imagination while charting the extreme particularity of human misery.

"Sal ̣or The 120 Days of Sodom (Sal ̣o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1975) is one of the most scandalous films ever made. It was Pier Paolo Pasolini's last film; he was murdered shortly after completing it. An adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's vicious masterpiece, but relocated to Facist-ruled Italy, Salo is an unflinching, violent portrayal of sexual cruelty which many find too disturbing to watch. But insightful artworks are often disturbing. Beneath the extreme, taboo-breaking surface of Salo, Gary Indiana argues, is a deeply penetrating account of human behaviour. It's a picture not only of fascism but also, prophetically, of the corporate-run consumer culture we live in today, 'where a limitless choice of gratifications disguises an absence of all choice and all resistance, where nothing can disrupt the smooth operation of a system that turns art into products and people into things.' "--Page COVER.

Inspector Rebus #7