Resentment: A Comedy

Gary Indiana, Patrick McGrath

Book cover for Resentment: A Comedy
Book cover for Resentment: A Comedy

Resentment: A Comedy

Resentment: A Comedy

Gary Indiana, Patrick McGrath

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Description

Day of the Locusts meets Bonfire of the Vanities in this searing burlesque about everyone from the east coast literati to Hollywood's superagents, actors, has-beens and wannabes. Gary Indiana takes no prisoners as he sets his hero, B-magazine writer Seth, out in Los Angeles to do a celebrity profile of a famous hetero actor who has just taken a major role as a homosexual with AIDS. While on the West Coast, Seth becomes mildly, then completely obsessed with the trial of two privileged young men who are accused of killing their parents in cold blood as they lay sleeping in their Beverly Hills home.
Indiana weaves the story of Seth and his not inconsequential resentment for the world at large with the riveting Martinez case as it unfolds before the American public. Ironically, hilariously, and ingeniously, Indiana juxtaposes both stories in this blackest of comedies, as he reveals the role of resentment in all human relationships, and the darker side of L.A. roiling beneath the glamour. The media loves nothing more than itself, and no writer/agent/actor/journalist will be able to resist this tell-all novel about all the beautiful people.

About the Author

Gary Indiana is a novelist, playwright, critic, essayist, filmmaker, and artist. Hailed by the Guardian as "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche," and by the Observer as "one of the most woefully underappreciated writers of the last 30 years," he published a memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, in 2015. He is also the author of Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story and Resentment: A Comedy (both published by Semiotex(e)).

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.

Critical Reviews

"Gary Indiana's writing remains filled with so much venomous aggression that it is almost easier to ignore the flood of compassion bubbling up beneath it.... He is, I think, one of the most woefully underappreciated writers of the last 30 years."
--M.H. Miller, New York Observer

"One reads Mr. Indiana's new work with astonishment at his talent, and astonishment at the absurdist bleakness of his vision."
--Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

"Gary Indiana is a fearless and valuable writer, willing to recount anything human beings are capable of with a kind of angry compassion and a spritz of disgust."
--The Washington Post

"Indiana's work... is criminally underrated; ergo, is sure to be reexamined, over and over again."
--Sarah Nicole Prickett, Bookforum

"Indiana has the kind of ruthless comic intelligence that I cherish in my friends and fear in my enemies."
--Molly Young, The New York Times

Publishing Information

Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Pub date: 2015-09-25
Length: 392 pages

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