I'm Losing You - by Bruce Wagner (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An epic novel that brings together a motley crew of characters, including porn stars in love, celebrity chore-whores, plotting dermatologists, masseurs, and shrinks, among many others cast in the debauchery of Hollywood.

I'm Losing You follows the rich and famous and the down and out as their lives intersect in a series of coincidences. A masterfully told story of decadence that examines the psychological complexities of Hollywood reality and fantasy, soaring far beyond the reaches of Robert Stone's Children of Light and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust.

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR I'M LOSING YOU

"Ruthlessly hip and very funny."--Wired

"The author's images, tones and language give I'm Losing You a hard beauty that glints like a black crystal."--Time

"Mr. Wagner . . . treats us to many glorious phrases and whole passages that have the self-propelled rhythm of great prose."--Adam Begley, New York Observer

"Electrifying . . . a viciously funny, kaleidoscopically plotted Hollywood satire. Will invite comparisons to Robert Altman, Tom Wolfe, or any other modern Swift or Pope you can think of."--Boston Book Review

"A funnier and even more brutal Hollywood send-up than his previous novel, Force Majeure . . . brilliant."--New York Post

"All of [the characters] are finely, beautifully drawn. . . . Wagner manages to breathe so much life into them that even their most despicable acts are understandable."--The Advocate

"The most distinctive Jewish novel since Portnoy's Complaint."--Jewish Journal

"A meditation on moral corruption and loss which is at turns hilarious, tragic, and at times as caustic as a shot of kerosene."--Detour

"A dazzling prose stylist."--Hartford Courant

PRAISE FOR BRUCE WAGNER

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

"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

"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.