> Skip to content
  • Published: 17 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781644211625
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

Fire Season

Selected Essays 1984–2021




“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.

2022 NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

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.
“One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche.” —The Guardian

Introduction by Christian Lorentzen

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 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 viewer’s imagining: There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame.

  • Published: 17 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781644211625
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

Also by Gary Indiana

See all

Praise for Fire Season

“Sex, hypocrisy, solitude, loss, the punitive affinities that swallow the self—these are Gary Indiana’s themes, jingling through his books like money in Balzac. But rumbling beneath the malice is a melancholy yearning, a mind groping vulnerably for a human link.” —Tobi Haslett, from the introduction to Horse Crazy
“Horribly refreshing, like an ice-cold glass of acid on a sweltering summer day . . . Indiana writes with an art critic’s eye for detail and a poet’s ear for language.” —Philadelphia Inquirer on Gone Tomorrow



 

penguin pop image
penguin pop image