Literature

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 read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

About The Author

Gary Indiana is a writer, playwright, filmmaker, and artist. He is the author of seven novels, including Do Everything in the Dark and The Shanghai Gesture, as well as several plays, collections of poetry and nonfiction, and essays in publications from Art in America to Vice. His visual art appeared in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

  • Publish Date: September 08, 2015
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Category: Biography & Autobiography - Memoirs
  • Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris
  • Trim Size: 5-1/2 x 8-1/4
  • Pages: 240
  • US Price: $25.95
  • CDN Price: $25.95
  • ISBN: 978-0-8478-4686-3

Reviews

"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 

Author Bookshelf: Gary Indiana