Dead Stars - by Bruce Wagner (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Bruce Wagner weaves together tales of desperation and depravity of the modern age in Dead Stars, his uproarious and sharply critical take on the obsessions of Hollywood.

Telma, the world's youngest breast cancer survivor, is threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old that's undergone a mastectomy. Reeyonna, a pregnant teenager, believes she will befriend Kanye West by auditioning for pregnant teenage porn. A photographer, Jacquie, rejuvenates her career by turning her lens toward dead babies. And Michael Douglas searches for purpose and meaning when his wife, Catherine, guest-stars on the television series, Glee.

Wagner gives a tour through the lowest depths of fame-seeking behavior and idolatry in what The New York Times called a "collagelike picture of Hollywood as a sewer of depravity."

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR DEAD STARS

"Wagner the doctor/novelist addresses his patients in an austere and loving tone. He grants haunted forgiveness. He is fully aware of the cost of spiritual hunger in the face of fame and all its temptations. He castigates, comforts and reprimands in equal doses and offers us novels of tenderness and grandeur."--James Ellroy

"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."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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 . . . a total leap, a stylistic satiric attack, a XXX accomplishment."--LA TIMES

"There 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. . . the London Fields of Los Angeles, the Ulysses of TMZ culture--an immensely literate, fearsomely interior novel about people who are neither."--GQ

"Dead Stars is a tragicomic Hollywood epic: obscene, scandalous, heartbreaking. Best American novel I've read in a year."--Bret Easton Ellis

"There are passages in Dead Stars that throb with Mr. Wagner's fury at our toxic culture of commodification, passages that are grounded in a spider web of details harvested by his heat-seeking eye and snared in his caffeinated prose."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

PRAISE FOR BRUCE WAGNER

"He is a visionary posing as a farceur."--Salman Rushdie

"If it was the promise of laughter that first drew me to Wagner's work, it is his language that has kept me hooked... Marveling at his comic and linguistic gifts, at his sheer storytelling verve - his ability to handle large ensembles of characters and keep numerous narrative balls in the air while at the same time shooting flames from his mouth and balancing a naked lady on his nose - I nevertheless introduce Wagner's work to my writing students with a caution: Don't try this at home." --Sigrid Nunez

"Bruce Wagner is Hollywood's master of satire."--Sam Wasson, author of The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

"Wagner is the James Joyce whose Dublin is Hollywood."--David Cronenberg

"Bruce Wagner writes really wonderfully about that whole milieu [of Hollywood] and its gothic vanity."--Emma Cline

"I'm a big Bruce Wagner fan."--Father John Misty

"Bruce Wagner's stories about Hollywood are the best I've read since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West."--Terry Southern

"Wagner writes like a wizard. His prose writhes and coruscates."--John Updike

About the Author

Bruce Wagner has written thirteen novels and bestsellers, including the famous "Cellphone Trilogy," I'm Losing You (PEN USA finalist), I'll Let You Go and Still Holding, Dead Stars, ROAR: American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr, The Empty Chair, and the PEN/Faulkner-finalist Chrysanthemum Palace. He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg's film Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. In 1993, Wagner wrote and created the visionary mini-series Wild Palms for producer Oliver Stone and co-wrote (with Ullman) three seasons of the acclaimed Tracey Ullman's State of the Union. He has written essays and articles for the New York Times, Artforum and the New Yorker. He lives in Los Angeles.