Utopia's Debris

Selected Essays

Contributors

By Gary Indiana

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Gary Indiana is one of America’s leading cultural critics — a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopia’s Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer.

His writings range from popular culture — trash novels, architectural wonders and horrors — to appreciations of the best of modern literature, art, and cinema. They include his convincing (and highly entertaining) debunking of fashionable conspiracy theories, a spirited and contrarian defense of Bill Clinton’s autobiography, a Mencken-like examination of the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the politics of celebrity in what Indiana calls the Age of Contempt.

A postmodern Emerson, Indiana wields scalpel-sharp wit and a fealty to logic on issues in which, all too often, irrationalism and emotionalism hold sway. At times rigorously serious, at other times whimsical, Indiana’s most conspicuous feature is skepticism — his wildly satirical contempt for conventional wisdom.
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On Sale
Nov 11, 2008
Page Count
360 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780786727094

Gary Indiana

About the Author

Gary Indiana — novelist, playwright, actor, art critic, film historian — is one of the most supple and imaginative figures in contemporary American culture. He is the author of numerous plays, novels, and works of nonfiction, including Horse Crazy, Rent Boy, and Utopia’s Debris. Formerly the chief art critic for the Village Voice, Indiana has also written for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, New York magazine, Artforum, and the London Review of Books. He lives in New York City.

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