Publishers Weekly
In Wagner’s latest “entertainment” (after Memorial), aging, struggling screenwriter Bud Wiggins (from Wagner’s debut, Force Majeure) is tapped to script a film for 12-year-old Biggie Brainard, the damaged brain behind booming Ooh Baby Baby productions. Biggie yearns for his mother and tracks her online as she spelunks the caves of the world. Bud lives with his mother, Dolly, and longs for the day she dies. Their chapters are braided with that of other Hollywood stars and black holes: Michael Douglas dreams of remaking All That Jazz, with a few major changes. Reeyonna, a pregnant teen, runs away from her mother, Jacquie (a Sally Mann-like artist-cum-Sears-Portrait-Studio photographer), with her “pharaoh-looking” boyfriend, Rikki—a foster kid, aspiring actor, and porn addict—to live with female American Idol reject, drug dealer, and sex fiend Tom-Tom, who’s squatting in Betty White’s house with Reeyonna’s half-brother Jerzy, “the first snatcherazzo” to get a photo of Dakota Fanning stepping out of a vehicle, sans panties. Jerzy’s addiction to “bootie bumpin” (meth and water applied anally) fuels a diabolical word-play and deepening delusion that Eminem is slowly enslaving the world. Written in hyper-hilarious, brilliant prose, the book renders an obsessive pop-culture nightmare of surprising realism and light, illuminating the meanest corners of its characters’—and our culture’s—desperation. Agent: Andrew Wylie. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
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
