Bruce Wagner, Author . Villard $25.95 (576p) ISBN 978-0-375-50002-2
In previous novels, Wagner (I'm Losing You; Force Majeure) has made a reputation as a sharp-eyed registrar of Beverly Hills mores. His new novel attempts an Angelino Bleak House, describing the gulf that yawns between the ungodly rich and the...
READ FULL REVIEW
Bruce Wagner, Author . Simon & Schuster $25 (368p) ISBN 978-0-7432-4337-7
Alternately brilliant and cluttered, this baroque third volume of Wagner's loose Hollywood trilogy (following the much-praised I'm Losing You
and I'll Let You Go
), moves along in fits and starts, crammed with celebrity cameos and sharp
READ FULL REVIEW
Bruce Wagner, Author . Simon & Schuster $21 (224p) ISBN 978-0-7432-4339-1
In his Cellular Trilogy, novelist Wagner gleefully excoriated Hollywood vanity and pretense. Obviously his hunger for butchering Tinseltown's sacred cows was not sated because in his latest work he continues to carve them up. His uproarious new...
READ FULL REVIEW
Bruce Wagner, Author . Simon & Schuster $25 (507p) ISBN 978-0-7432-7235-3
[Signature]
Reviewed by
Kurt Andersen
Like Wagner's previous books, Memorial
is set in a Los Angeles descended from Nathaniel West's and Joan Didion's but played for laughs as well as existential dread. It's an L.A. novel the way...
READ FULL REVIEW
Bruce Wagner, Author Villard Books $23 (0p) ISBN 978-0-679-41927-3
More soap opera than satire, screenwriter Wagner's wildly uneven second novel (after Force Majeure) presents a wide spectrum of loosely connected characters and situations. Set in contemporary Hollywood, the novel's ensemble cast ranges from budding
READ FULL REVIEW
Bruce Wagner. Penguin/Blue Rider, $30 (656p) ISBN 978-0-399-15935-0
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...
READ FULL REVIEW
Bruce Wagner. Penguin/Blue Rider, $26.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-399-16588-7
In this new collection of two novellas by the author of Dead Stars, a fictionalized Wagner sits down with two disparate characters who have undergone traumatic spiritual journeys, interviewing them over the course of a few days. In “First Guru,” a...
READ FULL REVIEW
Bruce Wagner, Author, Susan Kamill, Editor Random House (NY) $23 (468p) ISBN 978-0-394-58261-0
Heavily in debt and depressed, forever-up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter Bud Wiggins, who chauffeurs a limo to earn a steady income, drifts aimlessly from bed to bed and from one wacky script idea to the next. Bud, striving to feel ``rooted and...
READ FULL REVIEW
Bruce Wagner. Arcade, $26.99 (480p) ISBN 978-1-956763-22-5
Wagner (I’m Losing You) spins a delightful fictional oral history of the Zelig-like Roger “Roar” Orr over eight decades. Roar is alternately or concurrently an esteemed novelist, playwright, film director, poet, physician, and philosopher, and was...
READ FULL REVIEW
Bruce Wagner. Arcade, $26.99 (312p) ISBN 978-1-64821-041-9
Wagner (I’m Losing You) shines with “The Met Gala,” a devilish and dizzying novella about a wealthy Hollywood family, but stumbles in “Tales of Saints and Seekers,” a curious gathering of pseudo-philosophical allegories, making for a mismatched...
READ FULL REVIEW
ARTICLES
