Dead Stars

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Description

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 worlds youngest breast cancer survivor, is threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old thats 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.

Reviews

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

"[Wagner'sThe Empty Chair] would make a fine fictional companion to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton's writings on spiritual outrage and the impossibility of solace." --Dani Shapiro,The New York Time Book Review

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

"To say that [Maps to the Stars] deglamorizes the movie business is like saying that Upton Sinclair deglamorized the meat-packing industry... the medium of film allows Wagner to make his audience visualize (instead of merely imagine) the hallucinations that plague his characters." --Francine Prose

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

"[Dead Starsis] A Rabelaisian masterpiece." --Sam Sacks,The Wall Street Journal

"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 Wagner has written thirteen novels and bestsellers, including the famous Cellphone Trilogy, Im Losing You (PEN USA finalist), Ill 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 Cronenbergs 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 Ullmans 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.