Gary Indiana is the author of the novels Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Do Everything in the Dark, and the acclaimed "true crime" trilogy made up of Resentment, Three-Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference. He has also published a memoir, I Can Give You Anything but Love; a collection of art criticism, Vile Days; and Fire Season: Selected Essays.
"[A] literary legend and cultural hellraiser . . . [Rent Boy is]
his sleazy-genius book."--Chris Kraus "Interview Magazine"
"[Indiana's] novels mark him as the nearest thing we have to an
inheritor to the Burroughs strain in American fiction. That's the
strain that breaks or simply ignores middle-class taboos; embraces
narcotics and all kinds of sex; takes an interest in the uglier
emotions, like disgust, shame, and hatred; applies actual pressure
to American myths (the Western, the P.I., the gangster); has
recourse to science fiction and narrative fracture; keeps its eye
on the varieties of societal control (family, state, corporation,
media); and doesn't shy away from anything that might be mistaken
for sin."--Christian Lorentzen "New York Magazine"
"A funny book with a high degree of linguistic sophistication. It
also contains all the four-letter words, plus graphic descriptions
of sex, kinky perversions, drug abuse and mayhem . . . Danny, the
'rent boy' of the title, is . . . a distant, debauched cousin of
Holden Caulfield--a youthful truth-teller who sees himself
surrounded by phonies."--Michael Harris "Los Angeles Times Book
Review"
"An inheritor, perhaps, of early Burroughs or John Rechy or
Alexander Trocchi, or a 'fixture, ' as journalists like to say,
among the writers and artists who congregated around Manhattan's
East Village in the 1980s . . . Gary Indiana is still there,
developing the vivid ire and grit of his early works into a
sulfurous dissection of the American character that has few if any
rivals."--Adrian Nathan West "The Baffler"
"Gary Indiana is the patron saint of human detritus . . . Rent Boy
is a frolicsome slip of a book . . . a relentlessly tropey,
shamelessly over-the-top potboiler . . . A rude glamor radiates
from the book's prose . . . There's the instinct to high
literature, the pitch-perfect imitations of noir, the estrangement
and anhedonia exquisitely expressed."--Bailey Trela "Cleveland
Review of Books"
"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 . . . a peerless voice, one that describes a
falling floor that may never find its bottom." --Lori Soderlind
"New York Times Book Review"
"It is literature with the filter off: on the one hand, an account
of life as lived outside mainstream acceptance; on the other, a
telling entirely unrestrained by political correctness . . . In a
short space, Rent Boy is a multi-faceted little gem, a world of
'Versailles at 78rpm, ' and the sort of funny, sick, weird little
book you never forget."--John Self "The Critic"
"Indiana, a playwright, art critic, artist, and novelist with the
sensibility of a rogue private investigator, is edgy in two or
three ways. He's hip and unchill, he's lived on the edges of a lot
of things, like fame and Los Angeles."--Sarah Nicole Prickett
"Bookforum"
Ask a Question About this Product More... |