Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984 - 2021

2022 NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

'One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche.' -The Guardian

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.