Amputation: A Novel

(Hardback)

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AMPUTATION is the first novel to be written about the inferno that obliterated two Los Angeles cities in January of 2025. Major characters are comedian Stephen Colbert; Karen Bass; a TimotheeChalamet stunt double; a fiercely pro-Palestinian heiress and her Zionist father; disgraced Grey's Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch and a failed indie film producer--along with an assorted battalion of ordinary people, opportunists, and looters.

A fable drenched in hyperrealism, AMPUTATIONis a burnt jewel box showcasing Wagner's transcendent, scabrously poetic powers as he explores the lives (and deaths) of the fire victims, and the consequences of dereliction, delusion, incompetence--and impermanence.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR BRUCE WAGNER

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

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

If it was the promise of laughter that first drew me to Wagners 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 Wagners work to my writing students with a caution: Dont try this at home.Sigrid Nunez

"Bruce Wagner is Hollywoods master of satire."Sam Wasson, author ofThe 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

Im abigBruce 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

Author Bio

Bruce Wagnerhas written fourteen novels, including the famous "Cellphone Trilogy,"-I'm Losing You(PEN USA finalist),I'll Let You Go, and Still Holding-and the PEN/Faulkner-finalistChrysanthemum Palace. His more recent titles include ROAR: American Masterand The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers. He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. He lives in Los Angeles.