Last Seen Entering the Biltmore

Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975–2010

by Gary Indiana

$17.95 Paperback

312 pp., 6 x 9 in, 30 b&w illus.

Paperback
9781584350903
Published: November 5, 2010
Publisher: Semiotext(e)

$17.95

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Author(s)
Praise

Previously unpublished plays and writings by one of today's foremost satirical authors.

Before publishing his celebrated first novel, Horse Crazy, in 1987, Gary Indiana wrote and directed twelve plays for an informal company whose performers included the painter Bill Rice, composer Evan Lurie, the poet George-Therese Dickenson, writer and film actress Cookie Mueller, Warhol superstar and painter Viva, writer Victoria Pedersen, singer/actress Sharon Niesp, photographer Allen Frame, the legendary Taylor Mead, novelist Larry Mitchell, and others. Performed at the Mudd Club, Club 57, The Performing Garage, and Bill Rice's E. 3rd Street studio, Indiana's plays offered a kind of community theater for New York's underground.

This volume presents highlights of that repertoire, including Alligator Girls Go to College, The Roman Polanski Story, and Indiana's script for Michel Auder's videofilm A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, accompanied by archival performance photographs and selections from Indiana's contemporaneous journals and poems. These hilarious, incisive writings and scripts evoke a vivid and accurate portrait of writers and artists in the lower Manhattan of the 1980s—arguably America's last avant-garde—and anticipates Indiana's impressive subsequent literary career.

Gary Indiana is an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. Best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy registering the debased state of American life at the millennium's end (Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference), Indiana has been described by The Guardian as “one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche.”

In our era of frenzied consumerism and rising political and cultural conservatism Gary Indiana's plays, poems, and prose offer a needed alternative, independent approach to artistic production.
Eleanor Whitney
New York Foundation of the Arts

... this collection's thirty-five-year coverage is a strong starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the author's work.
Rain Taxi Review of Books

Last Seen makes for both a noteworthy survey of Indiana's work and a testimony of the raw, urgent beauty of the seventies and eighties art scenes in Los Angeles and Manhattan.... Last Seen is, ultimately, an important clarion call by a charismatic and candid voice.
Review of Contemporary Fiction