In a novel capturing an era that seems at once familiar and grotesque, a New York writer lands in Los Angeles in 1994.
Originally published in 1997, Resentment was the first in Gary Indiana's now-classic trilogy (followed in 1999 by Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story and in 2003 by Depraved Indifference) chronicling the more-or-less permanent state of “depraved indifference” that characterized American life at the millennium's end.
In Resentment, Seth, a New York–based writer arrives in Los Angeles (where he has history and friends) in mid-August, 1994, to observe what will become the marathon parricide trial of the wealthy, athletic, and troubled Martinez brothers, broadcast live every day on Court TV. Still reeling from the end of his obsessive courtship of a young SoHo artist/waiter, Seth moves between a room at the Chateau Marmont and a Mount Washington shack owned by his old cab-driving, ex-Marxist friend, Jack, while he writes a profile of Teddy Wade—one of the era's hottest young actors, who has “dared” to star as a gay character in a new Hollywood film. Studded throughout with scathing satirical portraits of media figures, other writers, and the Martinez trial teams, Resentment captures an era that seems, two decades later, at once grotesque, familiar, and a precursor to our own.
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.
Praise For…
"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
