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A profound and heart-wrenching work of spiritual storytelling from the internationally acclaimed author of
Celebrated for his “up-to-the-nanosecond insider’s knowledge of the L.A. scene” (), Bruce Wagner takes his storytelling in a radically new direction with two linked novellas. In a gay Buddhist living in Big Sur achieves enlightenment in the horrific aftermath of his child’s suicide. In Queenie, an aging wild child, returns to India to complete the spiritual journey of her youth.
Told in ravaged, sensuous detail to a fictional Wagner by two strangers on opposite sides of the country, years apart from each other, these stories illuminate the random, chaotic nature of human suffering and the miraculous strength of the human spirit.
If there's an even darker side to Hollywood than the one America is familiar with, Bruce Wagner has found it. A twenty-first-century Nathanael West, he has been hailed for his powerful prose, his Swiftian satire, and the scalpel-sharp wit that has, in each of his novels, dissected and sometimes disemboweled Hollywood excess.
Now, in his most ambitious book to date, the third in the Cellular Trilogy that began with and Wagner immerses readers in post-September 11 Hollywood, revealing as much rabid ambition, rampant narcissism, and unchecked mental illness as ever. It is a scabrous, epiphanic, sometimes horrifying portrait of an entangled community of legitimate stars, delusional wanna-bes, and psychosociopaths. Wagner infiltrates the gilded life of a superstar actor/sex symbol/practicing Buddhist, the compromised world of a young actress whose big break comes when she's hired to play a corpse on and the strange parallel universe of look-alikes — an entire industry in which struggling actors are hired out for parties and conventions to play their famous counterparts. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, ferocious and empathetic, is Bruce Wagner's most expertly calibrated work.
Twelve-year-old Toulouse “Tull” Trotter lives on his grandfather’s vast Bel-Air parkland estate with his mother, the beautiful, drug-addicted Katrina — a landscape artist who specializes in topiary labyrinths. He spends most of his time with young cousins Lucy, “the girl detective,” and Edward, a prodigy undaunted by the disfiguring effects of Apert Syndrome. One day, an impulsive revelation by Lucy sets in motion a chain of events that changes Tull — and the Trotter family — forever.
In this latter-day Thousand and One Nights, a boy seeks his lost father and a woman finds her long-lost love. . while a family of unimaginable wealth learns that its fate is bound up with two fugitives: Amaryllis, a street orphan who aspires to be a saint, and her protector, a homeless schizophrenic, clad in Victorian rags, who is accused of a horrifying crime.
In his most profound and accomplished book to date, acclaimed author Bruce Wagner breaks from Hollywood culture with a novel of exceptional literary dimension and searing emotional depth. Joan Herlihy is a semi-successful architect grasping at the illustrious commission that will catapult her to international renown, glossy de cor magazines, and the luxe condo designs of Meier, Koolhaas, and Hadid: the incestuous cult of contemporary Starchitects. Unexpectedly, she finds her Venice Beach firm on the short list for a coveted private memorial — a Napa billionaire's vanity tribute to relatives killed in the Christmas tsunami — with life-changing consequences. Her brother Chester clings to a failing career as a location scout before suffering an accidental injury resulting from an outrageous prank; the tragicomic repercussions lead him through a maze of addiction, delusion, paranoia — and ultimately, transcendence.
Virtually abandoned by her family, the indomitable Marjorie Herlihy — mother, widow, and dreamer — falls prey to a confidence scheme dizzying in its sadism and complexity. And unbeknownst to Marj and her children, the father who disappeared decades ago is alive and well nearby, recently in the local news for reasons that will prove to be both his redemption and his undoing. Spiraling toward catastrophe, separate lives collide as family members make a valiant attempt to reunite and create an enduring legacy. To rewrite a ruined American dream.
Deeply compassionate and violently irreverent, "Memorial" is a testament to faith and forgiveness, and a luminous tribute to spirituality in the twenty-first century. With an unflagging eye on a society ruptured by naturaland unnatural disaster, and an insatiable love for humanity, Wagner delivers a masterpiece.
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 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 , the actor plans a bold, artistic, go-for-broke move: to star in and direct a remake of Bob Fosse’s
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. 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.
Bruce Wagner’s is the story of Oscar award-winning actress Dusty Wilding, her wife Allegra, a long-lost daughter, and the unspeakable secret hidden beneath the glamor of their lavish, carefully calibrated, celebrity life. After Allegra suffers a miscarriage, Dusty embarks on a search for the daughter she lost at age sixteen and uncovers the answer to a question that has haunted for decades. With riveting suspense, Wagner moves between the perspectives of his characters, revealing their individual trauma and the uncanny connections to each other's past lives. sends the reader down a rabbit hole of the human psyche, with Wagner’s remarkable insights into our collective obsession with great wealth and fame, and surprises with unimaginable plot turns and unexpected fate. Alternately tender, shocking, and poetic, is Wagner’s most captivating and affecting novel yet.
In a time not far from our own, Lawrence sets out simply to build an artifical intelligence that can pass as human, and finds himself instead with one that can pass as a god. Taking the Three Laws of Robotics literally, Prime Intellect makes every human immortal and provides instantly for every stated human desire. Caroline finds no meaning in this life of purposeless ease, and forgets her emptiness only in moments of violent and profane exhibitionism. At turns shocking and humorous, Prime Intellect looks unflinchingly at extremes of human behavior that might emerge when all limits are removed.
An international Internet phenomenon, Prime Intellect has been downloaded more than 10,000 times since its free release in January 2003. It has been read and discussed in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Slovenia, South Africa, and other countries.
NASA discovered the alien ship lurking in the asteroid belt in the 1960s. They kept the Target under intense surveillance for decades, letting the public believe they were exploring the solar system, while they worked feverishly to refine the technology needed to reach it.
The ship itself remained silent, drifting.
Dr. Jane Holloway is content documenting nearly-extinct languages and had never contemplated becoming an astronaut. But when NASA recruits her to join a team of military scientists for an expedition to the Target, it’s an adventure she can’t refuse.
The ship isn’t vacant, as they presumed.
A disembodied voice rumbles inside Jane’s head, “You are home.”
Jane fights the growing doubts of her colleagues as she attempts to decipher what the alien wants from her. As the derelict ship devolves into chaos and the crew gets cut off from their escape route, Jane must decide if she can trust the alien’s help to survive.
Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. In each of these "weird and wonderful stories" (), Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. "Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts" (), Watson's vibrant prose captures the animal crannies of the human personality — yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of something wild, drawn to human connection but also to thoughtless abandon and savagery without judgment. Pinckney Benedict praises Watson's writing as "crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence," and Fred Chappell calls his stories "strong and true to the place they come from." This powerful debut collection marks Brad Watson's introduction into "a distinguished [Southern] literary heritage, from Faulkner to Larry Brown to Barry Hannah to Richard Ford" (, Columbia, South Carolina).
Angstblüte nennt sich, was die Natur bedrohten Gewächsen mitgegeben hat. Naht der Tod, steigen noch einmal die Lebenssäfte, der schönste Schein wird produziert. Metaphorisch durchaus auch auf das Personal in Walsers jüngstem Werk anwendbar. Angst vor Vergänglichkeit, Bedeutungslosigkeit, Alter und Untergang beflügelt Machtmenschen wie den Kunsthändler Diego Trautmann, der in seinem „Bonsai-Neuschwanstein“ an der Seite der ätherisch schönen Talkshow-Gastgeberin Gundi seine berühmten Empfänge zelebriert. Tiefsitzende Angst beherrscht auch den erfolgreichen Anlageberater Karl von Kahn, „siebzig-plus“ und Walsers Hauptakteur. Verbrauch ist trivial, Geldvermehrung hingegen bedeutet Vergeistigung. Zahlenwerk als höchste Kunstform. Karls Credo und Religion.
Weg vom Bodensee, mitten im prallsten Münchner Großbürgertum entfaltet Martin Walser sein Mysterienspiel vom Evangelium des Geldes. Walser-Leser kennen das Faible des Autors fürs Pekuniäre; es geht also hinauf in die dünne Luft des Aktienhandels, der Portfolios und virtuellen Geldströme. Exkurse, die — wortbrilliant zwar — allzu quälend ausufernd geraten. Atemberaubend dagegen, der tosende Lebensstrudel, der Karl von Kahn erfasst. Sein Weltbild gerät ins Wanken, als Diego, der Freund, mit einem raffinierten Finanzdeal Karl böse übervorteilt. Dann setzt Karls erfolgloser Künstlerbruder Erewein, der mit „Frau Lotte“ resigniert in einer Wohnhöhle verharrt, seinem Leben ein Ende. Was bleibt, ist ein geradezu lebensspendender Abschiedsbrief. Schließlich tritt Joni Jetter auf den Plan. Die Angstblüte setzt ein!
Mit Joni, Darstellerin in einem Film, der durch eine Finanzspritze Karls zustande kommt, findet Walser zur Hauptsache. Das hoffnungslos verliebte Finanzgenie sieht sich mit Alter, Sexualität, Liebe, Betrug und all den Lügen und Verdrängungen, die damit einhergehen, konfrontiert. Bereits in hat Walser die „Sexualität-im-Alter-Thematik“ als persönliches Reizthema aufgegriffen. Erneut staunt man: Der früher in sexuellen Dingen eher zurückhaltend bis prüde Walser wird in seinem Spätwerk sprachlich drastisch deutlich. Pure Walser-Ironie, alle klugen Theorien von Karls Ehefrau Helen, einer hingebungsvollen Paartherapeutin, werden vom tobenden Leben selbst zunichte gemacht. Am Ende hält Karl von Kahn eine immense Verlustrechnung in Händen. Sein Erkenntnisgewinn: Sehnsucht darf bleiben. Aufhörenkönnen muss gelernt werden.
Apropos Aufhörenkönnen. Vermittels einer eingeschobenen Episode über Jonis Vater, einen Ex-Polizeireporter, der aufgrund mangelnder politischer Opportunität von seinem Alt 68er-Chef förmlich in den Untergang getrieben wird, leckt Walser offenbar noch immer die Wunden der letzten Jahre.
Losing her son in a lorry accident, a woman abandons her lover and her life on the Mexican border and becomes a domestic servant in Madrid; following an awkward ménage-à-trois, a timber agent is blackmailed into introducing his lover's boyfriend to his best client; a depressed, misfit French teacher rejects the overtures of students and would-be lovers; all the while sharp-eyed young Araceli watches over everything from her decrepit apartment.
Nesting stories within stories, setting Bret Easton Ellis among his fellow mutts and enigmatic, love-hungry, dying Alba Cambó among her several lovers, Lina Wolff can really throw her readers a sucker punch.
Upstairs/downstairs distinctions blur as Wolff's adroit and subtle novel turns the tables, allowing servants and subordinates to dominate their masters. With a Bolaño-esque humor Wolff asks, what chance does love have in this dog-eat-dog world?
Alors que l’Amérique se prépare à fêter les cent ans de l’Armistice de 1914, un siècle de paix mondiale, d’avancées sociales et de prospérité, Cassie n’arrive pas à dormir. Au milieu de la nuit, elle se lève et va regarder par la fenêtre. Elle remarque alors dans la rue un homme étrange qui l’observe longtemps, traverse la chaussée… et se fait écraser par un chauffard. L’état du cadavre confirme ses craintes : la victime n’est pas un homme mais un des simulacres de l’Hypercolonie, sans doute venu pour les tuer, son petit frère et elle. Encore traumatisée par l’assassinat de ses parents, victimes sept ans plus tôt des simulacres, Cassie n’a pas d’autre solution que de fuir. L’Hypercolonie est repartie en guerre contre tous ceux qui savent que la Terre de 2014 est un paradis truqué.
With a deft hand and a blazing imagination, fantasy writer Walton mixes genres to great effect. Elements of fantasy, science fiction, and coming-of-age novels combine into one superlative literary package that will appeal to a variety of readers across age levels. After engaging in a classic good-magic-versus-bad-magic battle with her mother that fatally wounds her twin sister, 15-year-old Morwenna leaves Wales and attempts to reconnect with her estranged father. She was sent to boarding school in England, and her riveting backstory unfolds gradually as she records her thoughts, feelings, and experiences in a series of journal entries. An ominous sense of disquiet permeates the nonlinear plot as Morwenna attempts to avoid a final clash with her mother. In addition to casting an irresistible narrative spell, Walton also pays tribute to a host of science-fiction masters as she peppers Morwenna’s journal with the titles of the novels she devours in her book-fueled quest for self-discovery.
Morwenna Phelps, qui préfère qu’on l’appelle Mori, est placée par son père dans l’école privée d’Arlinghust, où elle se remet du terrible accident qui l’a laissée handicapée et l’a privé à jamais de sa soeur jumelle, Morganna. Loin de son pays de Galles natal, Mori pourrait dépérir, mais elle découvre le pouvoir des livres, notamment des livres de science-fiction. Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, James Tiptree Jr, Ursula K. Le Guin et Robert Silverberg peuplent ses journées, la passionnent. Alors qu’elle commence à reprendre du poil de la bête, elle reçoit une lettre de sa folle de mère : une photo sur laquelle Morganna est visible et sa silhouette à elle brûlée. Que peut faire une adolescente de seize ans quand son pire ennemi, potentiellement mortel, est sa mère. Elle peut chercher dans les livres le courage de se battre.
Ode à la différence, journal intime d’une jeune fan de science-fiction qui parle aux fées, Morwenna est aussi une plongée inquiétante dans le folklore gallois. Ce roman touchant et bouleversant a été récompensé par les deux plus grands prix littéraires de la science-fiction, le prix Hugo (décerné par le public) et le prix Nebula (décerné par un jury de professionnels). Il a en outre reçu le British Fantasy Award.
A remarkable multigenerational novel, transports readers into the world of an iconoclastic midcentury family.
In booming postwar Brooklyn, the Nowak Piano Company is an American success story. There is just one problem: the Nowak’s only son, David. A handsome kid and shy like his mother, David struggles with neuroses. If not for his only friend, Marianne, David’s life would be intolerable. When David inherits the piano company at just 18 and Marianne breaks things off, David sells the company and travels around the world. In Taiwan, his life changes when he meets the daughter of a local madame — beautiful, sharp-tongued Daisy. Returning to the United States, the couple (and newborn son) buy an isolated country house in Northern California’s Polk Valley.
As David's mental health deteriorates, he has a brief affair with Marianne, producing a daughter. When Marianne appears at their doorstep, the couple's fateful decision to take the child as their own determines a tragic course of events for the entire family. Told from multiple perspectives, culminates in heartrending fashion, as the young heirs to the Nowak fortune must confront their past and the tragic reality of their future.
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life — to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth — and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.
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