Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana
Born	Gary Hoisington 1950 (age 66–67) Derry, New Hampshire, U.S.
Occupation	Writer, filmmaker, photographer
Nationality	American

Gary Indiana (born 1950 as Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire) is an American writer, filmmaker, and visual artist. He teaches philosophy and literature at the New School in New York City.

Indiana is perhaps best known for his loose trilogy of books based on notorious criminals. While Three Month Fever is presented as an account of Andrew Cunanan, the man who murdered Gianni Versace, it uses fictional recreations of undocumented conversations and events to explore the contemporary American obsession with celebrity and fame. More obviously a novel, Resentment seems nevertheless to be an account, or perhaps a speculative exploration, of the case of California brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, convicted of the murder of their parents, though names and other details have been changed. Another fictionalization of real events can be found in Depraved Indifference, in which Indiana makes use of the case of Sante and Kenneth Kimes, mother-and-son con artists convicted of murdering heiress Irene Silverman (though again, names and details are changed). Indiana uses these stories to explore sexuality, violence, money, the media, and the contemporary American scene—with a special focus, perhaps, on those aspects of it associated with postmodernity. These three novels share aspects of satire with much of the rest of Indiana's oeuvre, and features of postmodern literary practice are also employed to varying degrees.

Indiana has also based multiple novels on fictionalized events from his own life and those of his associates and contemporaries. Gone Tomorrow, for example, mines his history as a film actor, particularly his work with German director Dieter Schidor and others in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's circle. Years later, Indiana returned to the raw material of his own life for Do Everything in the Dark, in which characters from earlier novels such as Horse Crazy and Gone Tomorrow return in a later, more melancholic stage of life.

In 2009, New York-based independent publishers Two Dollar Radio published Indiana's most recent novel, The Shanghai Gesture. (The Shanghai Gesture is also the name of a 1941 film by Josef von Sternberg.)

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