I Met Someone - by Bruce Wagner (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In I Met Someone--what Wagner has called a "tenderly mutilated companion piece" to his screenplay for Maps to the Stars (the film directed by David Cronenberg for which Julianne Moore won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress)--Oscar-winning Dusty Wilding learns the unspeakable secret hidden beneath the glamour of her carefully calibrated celebrity lifestyle and marriage. With Sirkian grandeur and fearless precision, Wagner scales the heights of his own magnificent obsession: the merciless horrors of destiny--and the shock of courage that often allows human beings to embrace the sacred. I Met Someone has been called "among the most poetic and tragic of all [Wagner's] work. And perhaps the most deliriously redemptive."

Review Quotes

Praise for I MET SOMEONE

"No one has delineated the agony of artistic endeavour with greater precision than Los Angeles's Bruce Wagner." -Matt Thorne, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Wagner takes great pains to endow his creations with detailed and vivid inner lives, in which even the shallowest circumstances are transformed into high-stakes questions of spiritual life and death" -Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World

"Wagner is a millennial heir to Nathanael West." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"It's like being locked in a room with the funniest and most enraged man you'd ever met. He's so dark, but I think he's brilliant." -Francine Prose

"I'd even go so far as to say that Wagner surpasses, in at least one respect, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby Stories, which until now was for me (along with Nathanael West's Day of the Locust), the ultimate Hollywood fiction." -Ron Rosenbaum, New York Observer

"Wagner has a feverish brain and a cool eye for the social distinctions that rule the film industry." - The Wall Street Journal

"Bruce Wagner knows Hollywood the way Dante knew Hell." - Michael O'Donoghue

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.