I Can Give You Anything But Love
The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today," Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.



With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work-from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this-his most personal book yet-the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing book and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.
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I Can Give You Anything But Love
The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today," Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.



With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work-from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this-his most personal book yet-the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing book and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.
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I Can Give You Anything But Love

I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

Narrated by Daniel Henning

Unabridged — 7 hours, 17 minutes

I Can Give You Anything But Love

I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

Narrated by Daniel Henning

Unabridged — 7 hours, 17 minutes

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Overview

The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today," Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.



With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work-from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this-his most personal book yet-the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing book and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

Editorial Reviews

|Los Angeles Times

A graphic and funny memoir…He becomes the connective tissue that binds together a diaspora of subcultures: the beatnik-era experimental writing and happenings of downtown New York, the 1960s co-opted counterculture gone awry, the punk movement that followed, and the art and intellectual circles of the Reagan 80s, when the AIDS crisis was wiping out a generation of young gay men like him.”

From the Publisher

"In sharing his memoirs, Gary Indiana exposes the inner turmoil, his naked truths of sexuality as a gay man and the clear and still present intuitive qualities of his distinctive and intelligent voice as a writer. . . 'I Can Give You Anything But Love' is not a breezy read and that is part of the fascination to be found in his writing style and livelihood."
-EDGEMEDIANETWORK.COM

"It's impossible to agree or disagree with all of Indiana's (often fearless) critical pronouncements, but it's likewise impossible to discount his tremendous style, wit, and education. Careworn copies of this long overdue memoir will change hands for the rest of the year and beyond." 
-FLAVORWIRE.COM 

"This memoir is classic Gary Indiana, waspish and gorgeous and a little wary of sharing its heart when sharing its other parts might work just as well."
-openlettersmonthly.com

"A graphic and funny memoir, [I Can Give You Anything But Love] finds Indiana reinventing yet another genre - this time using his own personal narrative. He becomes the connective tissue that binds together a diaspora of subcultures: the beatnik-era experimental writing and happenings of downtown New York, the 1960s co-opted counterculture gone awry, the punk movement that followed, and the art and intellectual circles of the Reagan 80s, when the AIDS crisis was wiping out a generation of young gay men like him." 
-THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

"I Can Give You Anything But Love is discursive, impressionistic, punctuated by incisive reflections on history and culture, witty evocations of period and place, mystifying forays into character assassination, and frank descriptions of sex." 
-THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 

Kirkus Reviews

2015-06-28
A writer, filmmaker, playwright, and artist recalls his past. In this ironically titled memoir, Indiana (Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World, 2010, etc.) gives little evidence of love but much graphic detail of sex, focused often on comparative penis sizes and tumescence. Although he claims to have "an unshakeable sense of utter insignificance," being "too peculiar to figure importantly in anyone's life, including my own," his voice throughout tends to be supercilious. Indiana characterizes his parents as "emotionally constipated," creating an environment that prepared him "for absolutely nothing." Growing up within "a swamp of human wreckage tainted by alcohol," any problem, he was taught, "was other people's fault." Early sexual experiences with boys left him believing that "sodomy was an arcane, specialized perversion, like bestiality." In his 20s, he was subject to panic attacks and depression; pickups did not fulfill his "pinching wish for attachment." In late-1960s California, Indiana "lived on no money, with no fixed address, becoming a ward of whatever boyfriend or commune whose orbit I drifted into," usually connected to his friend Ferd, a political activist and porno filmmaker. In those years, writes the author, psychedelic drugs "were taken like aspirin…and heroin users were seen as the truly daring souls, more ‘seriously' troubled than aimless run-of-the-mill LSD dropouts." Ferd often sent him to emergency rooms to steal syringes, errands he performed with alacrity. Later, living in Cuba, the author had an affair—"a complete pornographic fantasy"—with a sexually energetic deaf mute, a relationship he quickly found "tiresome." Among those singled out for scorn is Susan Sontag: arrogant, "exasperating," a woman whose "chronic aesthetic gourmandizing filled her with a histrionic rapture that required live witnesses." David Lynch was humorless, boring, and "smarmy." Indiana remarks that his memories are "colored by mood and contingency." The mood of this memoir is mostly rueful, bitter, and sad.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940192649848
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Publication date: 07/09/2024
Edition description: Unabridged
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