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69
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
44/100Critics
93/100Scholars
Author:
Gary Indiana
Publisher:
Seven Stories Press
Date:
April 19, 2022
Whether he's describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder or the installations of Barbara Kruger, 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 breathâin the same discerning, insolent, eloquent wayâabout high art and pop culture.
What The Reviewers Say
Few writers are as keenly alive to absurdity or write with as sharp a pen as Gary Indiana, whose new essay collection, Fire Season, spans almost forty years of stellar criticism.
The intellect of playwright, novelist, essayist, and critic Gary Indiana is notoriously brawny and sure-footed, ranging across, to borrow his words, 'the queasy context of the modern world' with an assurance and elegance largely unfamiliar to our era’s torrential toadyism and its twin, cancellation.
Indiana inhabits his role with fangs on. His famously antagonistic addresses to the reader...are as calculated as a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film: nothing is truly raw, disdain for bourgeois values is inbuilt and every depiction feels art-directed with decadent grime in mind.
Indiana’s intention is not disarmament. The premise of many of the longer essays...is that, contrary to what we learned in history class, the American political and judicial systems are defined by callous violence and absurd theater. In his reporting, he shocks by letting people and events speak for themselves.
