Bruce Wagner - Free Library Land Online

Deprecated: Array and string offset access syntax with curly braces is deprecated in /www/libraryLand/subs/polyamorous/engine/classes/templates.class.php on line 232 Call Stack: 0.0004 408712 1. {main}() /www/libraryLand/subs/polyamorous/engine/rss.php:0 Bruce Wagner - Free Library Land Online - Polyamorous https://polyamorous.library.land/ ru Bruce Wagner - Free Library Land Online - Polyamorous DataLife Engine Amputation https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/714172-amputation.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/714172-amputation.html

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 Timothée Chalamet 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, AMPUTATION is 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.]]> Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:26:42 +0200 ROAR https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/627243-roar.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/627243-roar.html ROAR

A new novel by Hollywood's "master of satire."
The myth of an epic, public life—its triumphs and tragedies—is a particularly American obsession. ROAR is a metafictional exploration of such a life and attendant fame of an extraordinary, and completely made up, man.
Born in Nashville in 1940 and adopted by a wealthy San Francisco couple, Roger Orr—"Roar"—became an underground stand-up comedian with a cult following while still in his teens, segueing to an acclaimed songwriter in the Sixties. In the decades that followed, his talent spanned the worlds of entertainment, from film directing and books to fine art (paintings, sculpture). His promethean energies expanded to the world of medicine; he became a dermatologist, the first to patent cadaver skin for burn victims. A spiritual seeker who returned to India throughout his life, Roar was also a voracious lover of both men and women.
The journey of Roger Orr was a premonition of the...]]> Tue, 13 Dec 2022 12:20:02 +0200 I'll Let You Go https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/114021-ill_let_you_go.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/114021-ill_let_you_go.html

"[Wagner] slices open the self-satisfied bosom of Los Angeles yet again in his third novel, a sprawling family saga that trades the usual mush-mouthed sentimentalities for cascading shards of knife-edged vignettes. A masterful, modern-day fantasy of millionaires and madmen, fathers and sons, reality and dreams."
--Kirkus Reviews

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." In I'll Let You Go, Wagner offers a stunning novel that surpasses anything he's done before.

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 laby-rinths. He spends most of his time with his...]]> Sun, 11 Nov 2012 16:10:47 +0200 Still Holding https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/122975-still_holding.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/122975-still_holding.html

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, Still Holding, the third in the Cellular Trilogy that began with I'm Losing You and I'll Let You Go, 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 Six Feet...]]> Mon, 11 Nov 1991 21:17:53 +0200 I’m Losing You https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/114022-im_losing_you.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/114022-im_losing_you.html

]]> Sun, 11 Nov 2012 16:10:47 +0200 The Empty Chair https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/108577-the_empty_chair.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/108577-the_empty_chair.html

Composed of two companion novellas, The Empty Chair is a profound, heart-wrenching piece of spiritual storytelling from Bruce Wagner, the internationally acclaimed author of such novels as Dead Stars, I’m Losing You and Force Majeure. In First Guru, a fictional Wagner narrates the tale of a Buddhist living in Big Sur, who achieves enlightenment in the horrific aftermath of his child’s suicide. In Second Guru, Queenie, an aging wild child, returns to India to complete the spiritual journey of her youth. Told in ravaged, sensuous detail to the author-narrator by two strangers on opposite sides of the country, years apart from each other, both stories illuminate the random, chaotic nature of human suffering and the miraculous strength of the human spirit. A deeply affecting and meditative reading experience, The Empty Chair is an exquisitely rendered, thought-provoking, and humbling new work.**

]]> Mon, 11 Nov 2013 15:22:00 +0200 Memorial https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/117249-memorial.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/117249-memorial.html

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 décor 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...]]> Sat, 11 Nov 2006 18:08:36 +0200 Dead Stars https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/99780-dead_stars.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/99780-dead_stars.html

]]> Sun, 11 Nov 2012 12:27:01 +0200 The Chrysanthemum Palace https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/125213-the_chrysanthemum_palace.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/125213-the_chrysanthemum_palace.html

The Chrysanthemum Palace introduces Bertie Krohn, the only child of Perry Krohn, creator of TV's longest running space opera, Starwatch: The Navigators (which counts Jennifer Aniston and Donald Rumsfeld among its obsessed fans). Bertie recounts the story of the last months in the lives of his two companions: Thad Michelet, author, actor, and son of a literary titan; and Clea Freemantle, emotionally fragile daughter of a legendary movie star, long dead. Scions of entertainment greatness, they call themselves the Three Musketeers; between them, as Bertie says, "there was more than enough material to bring psychoanalysis back into vogue." As the incestuous clique attempts to scale the peaks claimed by their sacred yet monstrous parents over a two-week filming of a Starwatch episode in which they costar, Bertie scrupulously chronicles their highs and lows -- as well as their futile struggles against the ravenous, narcissistic, Convulsive and poignant, The Chrysanthemum...]]> Mon, 11 Nov 2013 22:21:26 +0200 I Met Someone https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/114023-i_met_someone.html https://polyamorous.library.land/bruce-wagner/114023-i_met_someone.html

An emotional thriller by novelist Bruce Wagner, I Met Someone is the story of a fictional Hollywood marriage on the precipice of disaster—and an enthralling meditation on the world in which we live.

Bruce Wagner's I Met Someone 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. I Met Someone 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...]]> Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:10:48 +0200