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GARY INDIANA is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), ""a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians"" (n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. In 2015, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, following it up in 2018 with Vile Days, a collection of his art criticism for the Village Voice. Called one of ""the most brilliant critics writing in America today"" by the London Review of Books, ""the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society"" by Jamaica Kincaid, and ""one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche"" by the Guardian, Gary Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down.
Verbal artistry is in plentiful supply in this spirited collection of 39 essays in which critic Indiana (Horse Crazy) trains his eye on major court cases, politics, and pop culture. Northern Exposure is a look at the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primaries in which Indiana eviscerates the personae and platforms of Bill Clinton and Pat Buchanan (the latter summed up as a belligerent turd at the podium with his socks falling down ) and notes Sen. Tom Harkin's silent nonresponse to an anti-Semitic comment: I cannot imagine Mario Cuomo or Jay Rockefeller letting such remarks just sit there in the room, just to grub a couple of votes. Murdering the Dead takes down Steven Hodel's argument in his bestselling Black Dahlia Avenger that his father killed Elizabeth Short: It isn't nice to drag a lot of famous dead people into your family muck. Each entry is marked by vivid imagery and the author's scathing, eloquent wit: There is acid in everything Indiana writes, but it is of the sort that acts as a purifying agent, Christian Lorentzen writes in the introduction, adding, His essays are humane to the core. Trenchant and thought-provoking, this is a great look at a gifted writer's mind. (Apr.) -Publishers Weekly
