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Do Everything in the Dark
  • Published: 30 May 2023
  • ISBN: 9781635901863
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 296
  • RRP: $38.00

Do Everything in the Dark

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A dark yet compassionate comedy of art aspirations and friendships come to naught.

First published in 2003, Gary Indiana’s turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene. 

During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends—many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds—who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.

Arguably Indiana’s most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.
  • Published: 30 May 2023
  • ISBN: 9781635901863
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 296
  • RRP: $38.00
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About the author

Gary Indiana

GARY INDIANA (1950-2024) was a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century. 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 (reissued by Seven Stories Press in 2024). In 2018, his novels Horse Crazy and Gone Tomorrow were reissued in new editions by Seven Stories Press, featuring introductions by writers Tobi Haslett and Sarah Nicole Prickett, respectively. His essays and criticism have been anthologized in several collections, including Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985-1988, edited by Bruce Hainley (Semiotext(e), 2018), and Fire Season: Selected Essays, 1984–2021 (Seven Stories Press, 2022), introduced by Christian Lorentzen. 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 remained, until his death in 2024, both inimitable and impossible to pin down.
portrait photo of Gary Indiana

Also by Gary Indiana

I Can Give You Anything But Love
Fire Season
Vile Days
Gone Tomorrow
Horse Crazy
Last Seen Entering the Biltmore
See all

Praise for Do Everything in the Dark

“Gary Indiana belongs to a special breed of American urban writers who takes cool pleasure in dissecting the lives of the rich and ugly… On a good day, he makes Bret Easton Ellis look like Enid Blyton.”—Christopher Fowler, The Independent

“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…”—Michael H. Miller, New York Observer

“Gary Indiana is the real thing.”—Christian Lorentzen, The Vulture

“Gary Indiana belongs to a special breed of American urban writers who takes cool pleasure in dissecting the lives of the rich and ugly… On a good day, he makes Bret Easton Ellis look like Enid Blyton.”—Christopher Fowler, The Independent

“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…”—Michael H. Miller, New York Observer

“Gary Indiana is the real thing.”—Christian Lorentzen, The Vulture