Bruce Wagner is the author of "Memorial, The Chrysanthemum Palace "(a PEN/Faulkner fiction award finalist), "Still Holding, I'll Let You Go, I'm LosingYou," and "Force Majeure." He lives in Los Angeles."
A Top-Ten favorite book of 2012 from Sam Sacks of "The Wall Street
Journal " Written in hyper-hilarious, brilliant prose, [DEAD STARS]
renders an obsessive pop-culture nightmare of surprising realism
and light, illuminating the meanest corners of its characters and
our culture s desperation. " Publisher s Weekly, "STARRED review
"Dead Stars "is a tragicomic Hollywood epic: obscene, scandalous,
heartbreaking.Best American novel I ve read in a year
@BretEastonEllis [T]here are few writers capable of escorting us
more convincingly into a character s tender, gnarled mind. "Dead
Stars," easily Wagner s best and most ambitious novel yet, is a
huge, riveting book...every page contains something statically
electric enough to scorch the hair from your arms. "Dead Stars" is
the "London Fields" of Los Angeles, the "Ulysses" of TMZ culture an
immensely literate, fearsomely interior novel about people who are
neither. Tom Bissell, "GQ" [DEAD STARS is] not just the best novel
about Americans and fame of the past dozen years but the best since
Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust We all know the problems
that Mr. Wagner is criticizing we know about the idolization of
people who became famous by way of sex tapes; we know about the
mind-boggling traffic rates of online pornography; we know about
plummeting educational standards and shortening attention spans.
Sociologists give us statistics, and pundits write jeremiads. It
takes an artist to make us feel the full horror and humanity of the
situation. "Wall Street Journal"""" Dead Stars" is a manic,
hypersexualized take-down of Hollywood wannabes and strivers, a
relentless, wickedly funny, pornographic flash on the eddies of
fame in the present moment .the book is a total leap, a stylistic
satiric attack, a XXX accomplishment. Wagner is often called a
Hollywood writer; I'm not sure that's fair. Fame, craven desire,
sexuality, art, pornography, literature, envy, disappointment,
greed are these things limited to Hollywood? Carolyn Kellogg, "Los
Angeles Times""" Wagner s prose reads like the lovechild of Hunter
S. Thompson and David Foster wallace The most enjoyable riffs in
"Dead Stars" display Wagner s up-to-the-nanosecond insider s
knowledge of the L.A. scene....He also writes some clean, mean,
glittery dialogue. Lisa Zeidner, "The Washington Post""
"Wagner crafts a savage meditation on contemporary
self-involvement--his characters are vacuous, name-dropping black
holes of self-absorption. The writing itself is wonderfully bad, as
Bertie the hapless hack attempts to chronicle his melodramatic tale
with 25-cent words ("commodious," "numinous," etc.) and wickedly
overwrought metaphors ... It's a short, sharp book that puts a
dagger right in the heart of Hollywood." "Publisher's Weekly "on
"The Chrysanthemum Palace"
"Wagner shamelessly writes with his heart on his sleeve throughout,
daring his readers to be so callous as to question fiction's
ability to imagine the impossible." -- John Freeman, "The Boston
Globe, "on "Memorial"
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