Utopia's Debris: Selected Essays - Hardcover

Indiana, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 046500248X ISBN 13: 9780465002481

Publisher: Basic Books, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Gary Indiana is the author of thirty-two books, including Do Everything in the Dark, Depraved Indifference, Rent Boy, Resentment, Let It Bleed, and Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World. He lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 046500248X
• ISBN 13: 9780465002481
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320