Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021

by Gary Indiana, Christian Lorentzen (Introduction)

“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 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. 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 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 There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame. 

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Art, Criticism, Anthologies, Film, Literature

377 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 12, 2022

About the author

Gary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.

Reviews

[Mary Marshall · Rating 4 out of 5]

have been off my reading shit so this took me 4ever but this was rlly good and i will def need to go back and reread a certain essays for the rest of my life

rip indiana

[Cool_guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The art criticism I can take or leave, as most of it is beyond my ken. The travel pieces are hilarious, nasty. Gary Indiana is cruel in a way that only a brilliant kid from the sticks who found success in the big city can be. Could be . The world that Gary Indiana infiltrated and shaped is over now, thanks in part to people like him, the avant-garde of gentrification. All that's left are rich kids playing pretend.

[Jason Pollard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gary Indiana covering a 1992 Bill Clinton primary campaign speech: "The platitudinous verbal droppings, more like noises one makes to stimulate horses than actual thoughts, also resemble bromides from a soothing commercial for Preparation H: the proctologist, on close examination, has ruled against radical surgery in favor of something smooth and greasy and easy to dissolve in the collective rectum... If Clinton cares jack shit about anything besides getting elected, it doesn't show on that eerily symmetrical face, a visage of pure incipience..."

Critics Really need start being this nasty and incisive again! Love reading selected essays/non-fiction when checking out an author for the first time. It's pure, concentrated point of view & voice; this is how they see the world, whichever pieces of it they felt enough passion or deadline pressure to write about at the time. Their fiction, then, gets to engage with that world view on their terms. (Sure, you think and feel all of these things and can articulate them. What are you gonna do about it?)

All this to say, I'm excited to read some fiction from someone capable of such simultaneous vitriol and tenderness, someone who isn't afraid to hurl invective if it's aimed at someone who is causing harm. Great shit!

[Kaylee · Rating 4 out of 5]

def will be reading more gary indiana. there are some heaters in here.

[Tim Hilbert]

Essential!

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gary Indiana's knowledge feels vast and his way ot seeing, slightly askew. For me, this makes for a winning combination, whether it is about film, art or politics.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well done, RIP Gary.

My favorite essay was the one from the early 1990s on Branson, Missouri.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I grow up I want to be like Gary Indiana

[SweetCorn03]

essays from a foremost shit talker of culture, art, american life. mostly enjoyed