e-Book Dead Stars download

by Bruce Wagner

ISBN: 0399159355
ISBN13: 978-0399159350
Language: English
Publisher: Blue Rider Press; First Edition edition (August 2, 2012)
Pages: 656
Category: United States
Subategory: Literature

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ePub size: 1703 kb
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Rating: 4.6
Votes: 784
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No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Published simultaneously in Canada. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-101-59995-2.

Most of his characters, however, are so shallowly conjured - and their stories so predictably depressing or loathsome - that readers will not want to spend much time with them, much less 600-plus pages. Perhaps the more septic aspects of our real-life celebrity culture are so absurd that they are difficult to send up effectively.

Bruce Wagner is the author of The Chrysanthemum Palace (a PEN Faulkner fiction award finalist); Still Holding; I'll Let You Go (a PEN USA fiction award . .See if your friends have read any of Bruce Wagner's books. Bruce Wagner’s Followers (54). More follower. ruce Wagner.

-Tom Bissell, GQ. " not just the best novel about Americans and fame of the past dozen years but the best since Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust".

She never understood why. There was always a tension there; she told herself it was a blood thing, something in the blood. They’d been estranged for years. lyn, that he was a paparazzo. She knew that he moved to the West Coast a few years ago. She knew he was a drug addict. She knew, she knew, she knew . that Jerry was in touch with his stepfather, Jerilynn’s dad, & when her kid ran away-Is that what I should call it?-she called Ronny to get Jerry J. s cellphone Ronny still lived in New York, working (fitfully) as a .

Bruce Alan Wagner (born March 22, 1954) is an American novelist and screenwriter based in Los Angeles known for his apocalyptic yet ultimately spiritual view of humanity as seen through the lens of the Hollywood entertainment industry. Wagner was born in Madison, Wisconsin, to Morton Wagner and Bernice Maletz. When he was four, his family moved to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles four years later.

Bruce Wagner's I'm Losing You was hailed as "outrageous - dead-on in every way" by Janet Maslin in The New York Times. New York magazine's Walter Kirn called it "the year's best book. And John Updike, in The New Yorker, wrote that Bruce Wagner "writes like a wizard

Bruce Wagner's I'm Losing You was hailed as "outrageous - dead-on in every way" by Janet Maslin in The New York Times. And John Updike, in The New Yorker, wrote that Bruce Wagner "writes like a wizard. In I'll Let You Go, Wagner offers a stunning novel that surpasses anything he's done before.

Since his cellphone trilogy, novels with perhaps the cleverest titles in recent memory ( Still Holding, I’ll Let You Go and I’m Losing You ), Wagner has been the barker for a circus of freaky poseurs and hangers-on, all of them hustling and delusional.

Dead Stars is Bruce Wagner’s (I'm Losing You) most lavish and remarkable translation yet of the national zeitgeist: post-privacy porn culture, a Kardashianworld of rapid-cycling, disposable narrative where reality-show triumph is the new American narcotic.

At age thirteen, Telma is famous as the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor until threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old Canadian who’s just undergone a mastectomy … Reeyonna believes that auditioning for pregnant-teen porn online will help fulfill her dream of befriending Jennifer Lawrence and Kanye West … Biggie, the neurologically impaired adolescent son of a billionaire, spends his days Google Map-searching his mother-who abandoned home and family for a new love … Jacquie, a photographer once celebrated for taking arty nudes of her young daughter, is broke and working at Sears Family Portrait Boutique … Tom-Tom, a singer/drug dealer thrown off the third season of American Idol for concocting a hard-luck story, is hell-bent on creating her own TV series in the Hollywood Hills, peopled by other reality-show losers … Jerzy, her sometime lover, is a speed-freak paparazzo who “specializes” in capturing images of dying movie and television stars … And Oscar-winning Michael Douglas searches for meaning in his time of remission. While his wife, Catherine, guest-stars on Glee, the actor plans a bold, artistic, go-for-broke move: to star in and direct a remake of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz…

There is nothing quite like a Bruce Wagner novel. His prose is captivating and exuberant, and surprises with profound truths on spirituality, human nature, and redemption. Dead Stars moves forward with the inexorable force of a tsunami, sweeping everyone in its fateful path. With its mix of imaginary and real-life characters, it is certain to be the most challenging, knowing, and controversial book of the year.

Comments:

Error parents

I'm surprised to say that this book shocked even my jaded palate. It is pornographic and repellant. It's also gorgeously put together with the right amount of redemption after pathos- like salt, sparing.
Please note that Amazon suggests this book for 18 years and older. It is extremely graphic.
Once you get into the book's rhythm, it becomes addictive and engaging, propulsive, even.
Anyone else would've been satisfied to have written the longest, filthiest shaggy dog story imaginable. Bruce Wagner, of course, goes further and makes his grotesques believable characters who, even laying in the gutter (as the celebrity photographer does) feel that they are living the dream, building a bridge to the stars.
It might not be for you but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

Malakelv

Celebrity worship has spread like a cultural cancer. In Dead Stars it metastasizes into the culture of cancer--the celeberity fueled fund-raising business, that is. Wagner's supersharp ear and perfect pitch dialogue guides the reader on a Dantean journey thru concentric rings of Hollywood hell, from the A list of money and power to the Z list of nothing and nowhere. Surprise surprise! Not much separates the gaseous rings but the big break that may never come. Junkie papparazzi stalking pantie shots, art moms trading on their daughter's pudenda, horny adolescents treading water on of heavy drugs while surfing a toxic sea of every sort of porn imaginable--from a writer with less verve the whole disaster of the moment would be intolerable. Wagner pulls it off with pacing and pyrotechnics to create an updated Day of the Locusts even the locusts would flee!

Mopimicr

I really loved this book, with the understanding that this will so clearly not be everyone's cup of tea. It's audacious, *rude*, over the top and crazy. It is so au courant that it felt like the book was writing itself in real time. (This sense is best experienced in the Kindle version.) I imagined a satellite literally beaming down the text as I flipped the page. Dead Stars is a universe of internet and media noise -- every bit of nonsensical detritus you have ever picked up absorbing what passes for popular culture. As an LA native, I have a particular fetish for Hollywood dystopia, the sense of coming from an industry town where everyone and everything is somehow related to a star. My dad did weekend jobs for lunatic stars, my mom did some studio work, my grandmother did domestic work for an actor in Viva Las Vegas. I saw Rose Marie and Vincent Price in an unemployment line. Everything mythic and large is irreducibly small and pathetic. What seemed private to us locals is now grossly public. The bloom is off the rose, and the rose was wilted to begin with. Dead Stars is that world, in all its seamy, sordid splendor. Best of all is the writing, the creation of words and smashups to capture the mess. Hat's off to Bruce Wagner for this bravura performance! He's a star, heaven help him.

Cordann

Anyone downrating this book knows nothing about literature, and is probably harping about the content. If the content of a book is what bothers you, you don't deserve to read literary works. You'll never understand what's in front of you. Read Grisham novels and save the moralizing for Twitter rants.

Thundershaper

If there is one book that I could recommend to anyone with any interest in modern literature it would absolutely be this book.
Incredibly diverse, insightful, culturally aware, incredibly original and sexy, sometimes bittersweet and a book that will make you both laugh and cry at the same time. A book that you would want to reread and reread all the time you have free time. Thick and long? Hell yes. At times difficult to read? Yes Amazing and incredible? Absolutely. And no I am not getting paid by anyone to write this.

Redfury

An unconventional novel, utilizing net references and real people throughout. I am a fan of Wagner's work and this was wicked fun, but not for everyone. I can see how this could be a polarizing book.

Adrierdin

crazy!

Bruce Wagner paints a remarkably majestic and comic portrait... a palimpsest of America reinventing itself second by panicked second. Woven throughout I heard the updated voices of Lenny Bruce, Hunter Thompson and Sam Kinison... scathing, savage, and insightful. Dead Stars is utterly fascinating with powerful fits and starts that launch the reader into landscapes scattered with monstrous ids, shattered hearts and bare-boned suffering, all magically trussed together with wit and verve. More than anything, this big book is fueled by the author's compelling love and relentless joy of writing.