Gary Indiana's essays, like his fiction, take no prisoners. In fifteen years of writing for the likes of The Village Voice, Artforum, Details and Art in America, he has covered the range from Rodney King's beating to Mary McCarthy, to EuroDisney and the Reagan-Bush years. Ignoring good taste, his insights are acute, brash, bracing and intelligent; Let It Bleed collects for the first time some of the most engaging and provocative writing that has been produced in a long time.
I'm constantly telling people to read Gary Indiana. For one thing, no one writes as well as he does. There's a kind of mental courage in all of his work that I cannot describe, but I can say that it has everything to do with translating acute observation into transparent prose. Indiana has applied himself to our civilization's descent into barbarism, which he correctly identifies as our incredible ability to stop thinking, without losing a sense of humor or scale or succumbing to hysteria. When things look grim I like to remind myself that we still have writers as good as Indiana -- one of the last of the tall trees, as Mary McCarthy once said -- well, we still have one writer as good as Indiana. The perfect book to take with you on your trip to Branson, Missouri, Eurodisney, any courtroom in Los Angeles or anywhere, for that matter.
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