I Can Give You Anything But Love

I Can Give You Anything But Love
Author: Gary Indiana
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1644213907

A beloved memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature—whose graphic, funny, and caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. "[Indiana] becomes the connective tissue that binds together a diaspora of subcultures: the beatnik-era experimental writing and happenings of downtown New York, the 1960s co-opted counterculture gone awry, the punk movement that followed, and the art and intellectual circles of the Reagan 80s, when the AIDS crisis was wiping out a generation of young gay men like him." —Los Angeles Times With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post–summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he lived and worked occasionally over the past decades. Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

City of the Century

City of the Century
Author: James B. Lane
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 1978-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780253111876

The United States Steel Corporation founded Gary in 1906 as an experiment in industrial urban planning, and the inscription on the city's official seal accordingly proclaims it the "City of the Century." Gary proved to be no more immune to the woes of industrialization than any other American city, however. To some, in fact, it has come to epitomize all that is wrong with contemporary urban life. But as this book clearly shows, the people of Gary have refused to surrender their sense of hope, their dignity, and their pride to the prophesiers of doom. At once scholarly and colorful, "City of the Century" is an outgrowth of urban historian James B. Lane's popular weekly columns for the Gary Post-Tribune. Lane uses the oral testimony of the people of Gary to tell a fascinating story. There are episodes of personal tragedy and heroism here, of frustrated dreams and tarnished reputations, and of challenges met and obstacles overcome.

Depraved Indifference

Depraved Indifference
Author: Gary Indiana
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2003-07-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312316419

Gary Indiana, a 'huge satirical talent' (The New York Times), presents a darkly comic novel fueled by the virtuoso con artist Evangeline Slote and her extravagant life of chicanery and petty crime. Inspired by the case of Sante and Ken Kimes, the real-life mother/son grifters, the novel is a dissection of the mind of a charismatic sociopath and a satire of the society that appeases and abets her.

Lost Gary, Indiana

Lost Gary, Indiana
Author: Jerry Davich
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2015-05-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1625851375

A poster child for our nation's urban experimentation a century ago, Gary was forged with hype and hope, dreams and sweat, political agendas and tons of steel. The hardscrabble city attracted all kinds, from shady scoundrels and famous architects to hardworking immigrants and brilliant entrepreneurs. Boasting 180,000 residents at its peak, the booming melting pot eventually faded away under the afflictions of urban decay, racial unrest and political upheaval. Jerry Davich explores the remnants of Gary's glory days, from Union Station in ruins to City Methodist Church stripped of its soul. Revisit the Sheraton Hotel's demise, Emerson High School's hard lessons, Vee-Jay Records' last release and a devastated downtown filled only with façades and fond memories.

Do Everything in the Dark

Do Everything in the Dark
Author: Gary Indiana
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2023-05-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1635901871

A dark yet compassionate comedy of art aspirations and friendships come to naught. First published in 2003, Gary Indiana’s turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene. During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends—many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds—who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell. Arguably Indiana’s most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.

Environmental Inequalities

Environmental Inequalities
Author: Andrew Hurley
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2009-11-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0807898783

By examining environmental change through the lens of conflicting social agendas, Andrew Hurley uncovers the historical roots of environmental inequality in contemporary urban America. Hurley's study focuses on the steel mill community of Gary, Indiana, a city that was sacrificed, like a thousand other American places, to industrial priorities in the decades following World War II. Although this period witnessed the emergence of a powerful environmental crusade and a resilient quest for equality and social justice among blue-collar workers and African Americans, such efforts often conflicted with the needs of industry. To secure their own interests, manufacturers and affluent white suburbanites exploited divisions of race and class, and the poor frequently found themselves trapped in deteriorating neighborhoods and exposed to dangerous levels of industrial pollution. In telling the story of Gary, Hurley reveals liberal capitalism's difficulties in reconciling concerns about social justice and quality of life with the imperatives of economic growth. He also shows that the power to mold the urban landscape was intertwined with the ability to govern social relations.

Gone Tomorrow

Gone Tomorrow
Author: Gary Indiana
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-09-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609808630

Footloose and broke, the unnamed narrator of Gone Tomorrow hops on a plane without asking questions when his director friend offers him a role in an art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogotá, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grosvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than in shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the beautiful, nymph-like Michael Simard doesn’t seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film’s shady financier is sleeping with his mother, while a serial killer skulks about the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration begins in nearby Cali. But once the fiesta is over, all that’s left are ghostly memories and the narrator’s insistence on telling the tale. “Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels,” writes Dennis Cooper, “Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It’s a philosophical work devised by a writer who’s both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life.”

Three Month Fever

Three Month Fever
Author: Gary Indiana
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-05-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1584351985

A sardonic and artful reconstruction of the brief life of the party boy who became a media sensation for shooting Gianni Versace. It was suddenly chic to be “targeted” by Andrew.... It also became chic to claim a deep personal friendship with Versace, to infer that one might, but for a trick of fate, have been with Versace at the very moment of his “assassination,” as it had once been chic to reveal one's invitation to Cielo Drive in the evening of the Tate slayings, an invitation only declined because of car trouble or a previous engagement... —from Three Month Fever First published in 1999, Gary Indiana's Three Month Fever is the second volume of his famed crime trilogy, now being republished by Semiotext(e). (The first, Resentment, reissued in 2015, was set in a Menendez trial-era L.A.) In this brilliant and gripping hybrid of narrative and reflection, Indiana considers the way the media's hypercoverage transformed Andrew Cunanan's life “from the somewhat poignant and depressing but fairly ordinary thing it was into a narrative overripe with tabloid evil.” “America loves a successful sociopath,” Indiana explains. This sardonic and artful reconstruction of the brief life of the party boy who became a media sensation for shooting Gianni Versace is a spellbinding fusion of journalism, social commentary, and novelistic projection. By following Cunanan's notorious “trail of death,” Indiana creates a compelling portrait of a brilliant, charismatic young man whose pathological lies made him feel more like other people—and more interesting than he actually was. Born in a working-class exurb of San Diego and educated at an elite private school, Cunanan strove to “blend in” with the upscale gay male scene in La Jolla. He ended up crazed and alone, eventually embarking on a three-month killing spree that took the lives of five men, including that of Versace, before killing himself in a Miami boathouse, leaving behind a range of unanswerable questions and unsolvable mysteries. “Gary Indiana belongs to a special breed of American urban writers who take cool pleasure in dissecting the lives of the rich and ugly and is possibly the most jaded chronicler of them all. On a good day, he makes Bret Easton Ellis look like Enid Blyton, yet many, myself included, think he might have already written the Great America Novel(s).” —Christopher Fowler, The Independent

Gary, the Most American of All American Cities

Gary, the Most American of All American Cities
Author: S. Paul O'Hara
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2011-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253004993

U.S. Steel created Gary, Indiana. The new steel plant and town built on the site in 1906 were at once a triumph of industrial capitalism and a bold experiment in urban planning. Gary became the canvas onto which the American public projected its hopes and fears about modern, industrial society. In its prime, Gary was known as "the magic city," "steel's greatest achievement," and "an industrial utopia"; later it would be called "the very model of urban decay." S. Paul O'Hara traces this stark reversal of fortune and reveals America's changing expectations. He delivers a riveting account of the boom or bust mentality of American industrialism from the turn of the 20th century to the present day.

Rent Boy

Rent Boy
Author: Gary Indiana
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2023-01-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1946022535

A noir tour-de-force set in a world of hustlers from "one of America's darkest and funniest chroniclers." (The Guardian)