Name: I Can Give You Anything But Love
Price: 10.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Gary Indiana
ISBN: 9781644213902

A beloved memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature—whose graphic, funny, and caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.

“[Indiana] 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.” —Los Angeles Times

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 lived and worked occasionally over the past decades.

Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book—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 read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

“Beautifully written, Gary Indiana’s ‘memoir’ is one of his greatest books: a heartbreaking, astringently accurate account of the tidal shifts between the American 20th and 21st centuries. Indiana is one of the smartest, most truthful writers living today.” —Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and After Kathy Acker

“Gary Indiana’s memoir is written with both laconic distance and a sense of urgency. It is comic and then almost melancholy. He can create memorable characters and dramatic moments in stylish sentences that seem effortless. But, more than anything, this book is a display of a personality that is sardonic and sharp, fiercely intelligent, vulnerable and original.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island

“I Can Give You Anything but Love recounts the wicked adventures of old Gary in Cuba and young Gary living dangerously in the demimondes of LA, San Francisco, Boston, and New York, in prose so conversant and apt it’s like a superpower, like ease in a foreign element, breathing underwater or flying. Fueled by Swiftian indignation at our unbelievable stupidity, accuracy is a kind of revenge on a world that declines to return our love. Young Gary suffers the opposite of an education: he unlearns till all that remains is chaos and invisibility. He respects beautiful flesh and friendship’s damaged utopia as he encounters others who are also desperate, brilliant, and sometimes famous.” —Robert Glück, author of About Ed

“Gossipy and acerbic, raunchy and unsentimental, I Can Give You Anything but Love defies the conventional moods and gestures of memoir to give us a portrait of the young man who will become Gary Indiana: one of the most gifted, most uncompromising writers of our era.” —Ryan Ruby, author of The Zero and the One

I Can Give You Anything But Love

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By Gary Indiana