INDIANA, GARY

This is a collection of the best cultural criticism by the scabrous, satirical and always sublime Gary Indiana.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 his selection of the best, which, over the past two decades, have been published in a variety of journals and magazines (including "The Village Voice", "New York", and the "Los Angeles Times Book Review", among others). They reveal him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer.His essays 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 defence 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.Indiana is not hostage to the nostrums of the 'right' or the 'left'. On the contrary, he is a post-modern Emerson, with a scalpel-sharp wit and a fealty to logic on issues in which, all too often, irrationalism and emotionalism hold sway. He moves across a wide spectrum of subjects: sometimes rigorously serious, at other times whimsical, but his most conspicuous feature is scepticism - his wildly satirical contempt for conventional wisdom.

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