Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975-2010 (Semiotext

by Gary Indiana

Previously unpublished plays and writings by one of today's foremost satirical authors. Before publishing his celebrated first novel, Horse Crazy , in 1987, Gary Indiana wrote and directed twelve plays for an informal company whose performers included the painter Bill Rice, composer Evan Lurie, the poet George-Therese Dickenson, writer and film actress Cookie Mueller, Warhol superstar and painter Viva, writer Victoria Pedersen, singer/actress Sharon Niesp, photographer Allen Frame, the legendary Taylor Mead, novelist Larry Mitchell, and others. Performed at the Mudd Club, Club 57, The Performing Garage, and Bill Rice's E. 3rd Street studio, Indiana's plays offered a kind of community theater for New York's underground. This volume presents highlights of that repertoire, including Alligator Girls Go to College , The Roman Polanski Story , and Indiana's script for Michel Auder's videofilm A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking , accompanied by archival performance photographs and selections from Indiana's contemporaneous journals and poems. These hilarious, incisive writings and scripts evoke a vivid and accurate portrait of writers and artists in the lower Manhattan of the 1980s—arguably America's last avant-garde—and anticipates Indiana's impressive subsequent literary career.

Genres: Poetry

312 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2010

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

[baruch]

this took me forever to read bc i actually was developing pneumonia from the moment i began.. today is the first day i have felt better since dec 15… anyways this has NO RELATION AT ALL to how i feel about this book.. after first reading mr indiana a while back i wasnt so sure i was a big fan of his work; i was dead wrong! this rocks and im about to enter my gary indiana phase.

[Will Lyman · Rating 5 out of 5]

We need more writers like Gary Indiana!

Particularly loved Alligator Girls go to College, Roy Cohn, And a Putrid Time Was Had by All.

The poems about romance were sweet, if a little funny to read now. Many of them ate like lines from a Twitter debrief of a situationship.