Depraved Indifference by Gary Indiana

Depraved Indifference by Gary Indiana

The third of Gary Indiana's famed crime trilogy tells a story inspired by the virtuoso con artistry of mother-and-son criminals Sante and Kenneth Kimes.

She collected future marks like lottery tickets. She operated by reflex. Any public room was a pristine harvest of human information. Not just business cards, phone numbers, fax numbers and the like, but weaknesses, quirks, character flaws, delusional ambitions, risky dreams, medical problems, shaky marriages. Everybody came equipped with a panel of invisible buttons.... If you had the right touch, if you knew how to press one button lightly and another button with a bit more force, you could make the emotional side of a person swing up and down as you wished.
--from Depraved Indifference

First published in 2001, Depraved Indifference is the third of Gary Indiana's famed crime trilogy now being reissued by Semiotext(e). Inspired by the virtuoso con artistry of mother-and-son criminals Sante and Kenneth Kimes, Depraved Indifference follows Evangeline Slote, a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor "so compulsive she grifts herself when she runs out of other people" through the circus of calamity that her compulsions invoke. Evangeline, or "Evelyn Carson, "Princess Shah Shah," among other pseudonyms, accompanied by her alcoholic husband Warren and fanatically devoted son Devin, moves from Las Vegas to Hawaii to Nassau in a maelstrom of forgery and fraud that constantly threatens to come undone. When Warren dies, Evangeline and her son embark upon an ever more brazen series of grifts, frauds, and crimes. Thriving on chaos, a master of manipulation and seduction, Evangeline concocts the scheme to end all schemes--which may take a murder to complete.

Reminiscent of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, Indiana's scathing, insightful prose is a mirror to the empty landscape of American culture.

An actor, playwright, artist, poet, critic, and novelist who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century, Gary Indiana was born in 1950 in New Hampshire. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians (n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. With 1997's Resentment: A Comedy, Indiana began his true crime trilogy, following up with Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002). Together, the three novels show the most vicious crimes in our nation's history to be only American pathologies personified. In 2015, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love. Called one of the most brilliant critics writing in America today by the London Review of Books, the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society by Jamaica Kincaid, and one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche by the Guardian, Gary Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781635901085
ISBN 10	1635901081
Title	Depraved Indifference
Author	Gary Indiana
Series	Semiotext Native Agents Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Semiotext (E)
Year published	2020-01-17
Number of pages	344
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.