The Great Indoorsman: Essays

Review\n"Ironic, joking, thoughtful, nostalgic, and moving, these lyric essays, reflections, lighthearted arguments, and odes meditate playfully on the peculiar human environments we discover indoors."—Hugh Sheehy, Full Stop Published On: 2022-05-20\n"The Great Indoorsman is the work of a true craftsperson and the phrasing and structure feels akin to architecture, all lines, angles and inspired thinking, leavened with a pop culture and extended cultural knowingness that left me smiling and nodding my head throughout."—Ben Tanzer, litreactor.com Published On: 2022-08-17\n“Absurdist and absurdly amusing, Andrew Farkas takes readers on a sublime tour through dive bars and coffeehouses, dilapidated movie theaters and dying malls. A doctor of knowledge, erudite but humble, Farkas creates an enchanting yet down-to-earth collection perfect for indoors, outdoors, or anywhere in between.”—Kathleen Rooney, author of Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey\n“Andrew Farkas, the master renovator in these crafted and crafty essays, is the ultimate interior decorator of all things turned inside out. Here the reflections reflect infinite rooms where we are, at once, lost and found, found and lost with-in hallways of infinite with-in-ings.”—Michael Martone, editor of The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne\n“Throughout this deliriously inventive collection, Andrew Farkas operates like a 1930s Rube Goldberg cartoon jalopy, nimbly galumphing through mundane worlds—a waiting room, a hamburger joint, Tuscaloosa. The elevated performance is grounded by a sincere, persistent question: Where is home?”—David Giffels, author of Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America\nMany authors have traveled and explored the out-of-doors, both in life and then in their books, proving themselves stalwart, audacious, even heroic; Andrew Farkas is not among them. He is brave enough to admit that the outdoors isn’t for him. Instead, in these essays Farkas reports on his bold explorations of a very different territory: the in-of-doors, the waiting rooms, kitchens, malls, bars, theaters, roadside motel rooms, and other places that feature temperature control, protection from rampaging predators, and a higher degree of comfort than can be found outside.\nFarkas discovers that, just as the mannered and wonderfully (gloriously) artificial indoors influences us greatly, our lives are also controlled much more by fiction than by anything “real.” So come in out of the weather (it’s always terrible) and join the Great Indoorsman on his adventures, where he makes fun of pretty much everything, most of all himself.