Fire Season

“It requires no genius to be disgusted with our culture these days, but Gary Indiana expresses his own disdain with a rare intelligence. The essays collected in FIRE SEASON: Selected Essays 1984-2021 are erudite, discomforting and often caustic — and almost always spot on, which is a little sad because they tell us such ugly true things. . . . Indiana’s views penetrate so far beyond the usual pabulum that it requires a bit of moral courage to read them, and a dark sense of humor would also help. “Up close, Bill Clinton looks like he’s covered in fresh fetal tissue,” he observes in his essay on the 1992 presidential campaign. Whether Indiana’s voice is disturbing or hilarious depends largely on the reader’s relationship to sarcasm. Either way, “Fire Season” immortalizes a peerless voice, one that describes a falling floor that may never find its bottom.”

– Lori Soderlind, The New York Times Book Review

“Since 1987, Indiana has published novels, nonfiction, plays, short stories — all with an unmistakable, sardonic voice embedded in the text…”

– Los Angeles Times

“One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche.”

– The Guardian

“Verbal artistry is in plentiful supply in this spirited collection of 39 essays in which critic Indiana 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.”

– Publishers Weekly

“Even if you don’t agree with him, the iconic Gary Indiana is always worth your time. This collection of his essays contains, as the publisher puts it 'sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting-edge film, art, and literature.' Sounds about right.”

– Emily Temple, Lit Hub

“One peril of being a ‘bad boy’ writer is the possibility of becoming a parody of yourself. The very label renders danger into cuteness and threat into spectacle. European and Latin American authors still play the part, prompting kerfuffles among their publics. Yet, in the US, where dangerous prose might induce a cut in federal arts funding but rarely anything less punitive, Gary Indiana is one of our few surviving provocateurs.”

– Frieze

“Few writers are as keenly alive to absurdity or write with as sharp a pen as Gary Indiana, whose new essay collection, Fire Season, spans almost forty years of stellar criticism. . . . It’s enormously pleasurable to revisit his brilliant mind.”

– Claire Messud, Harper's

“A triumphant collection . . . Indiana is a lapidary wielding a straight razor”

– Jennifer Krasinski, 4Columns

“It’s hard to think of another living critic who has hated and loathed so much, and with so much swagger, for so long. . . . His prose is a machine for annihilating clichés.”

– Zachary Fine, Art In America

“Gary Indiana is the most wicked chronicler of the modern psyche; an unsparing and sardonic, always nailing voice from high art to pop culture, Barbra Kruger’s art to EuroDisney. He mines mundanity to find human complexity and drills into the dark and dramatic to present reason.”

– Anna Cafolla, AnOther Magazine

“Indiana’s greatness rests partly on his ability to fling aside the sheer curtains partitioning love from hate and extract a superior pleasure from their mixture.”

– Paul McAdory, Gawker

“Fire Season, an eclectic new selection of thirty-nine essays from 1984 to 2021, spans my own, give or take a few months on either end. It makes a compelling case that the window on American democracy closed sometime before I became a teenager: between Bill Clinton’s surprising second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary on 18 February 1992 and the opening of the assisted suicide trial of Dr. Jack Kevorkian on 20 April 1994. In that period, Indiana filed five pieces for the Voice – ‘Northern Exposures’, ‘Disneyland Burns’, ‘Town of the Living Dead’, ‘LA Plays Itself’ and ‘Tough Love and Carbon Monoxide in Detroit’ – that deserve to be regarded as classics of cultural reportage and travel writing. When paired with the more recent art, film and book reviews collected in Fire Season, they connect, as Christian Lorentzen writes in his introduction, ‘the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in ways readers and critics are only beginning to apprehend”

– New Left Review