Description

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Force Majeure was called a “smashing debut novel” by the Kirkus Reviews upon its original publication in 1991. A sardonic and absurdly dark, yet hilarious take on the “business as usual” of Hollywood’s twisted class system that proved Bruce Wagner was not just an author, but a cultural anthropologist.

The perpetually up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter, Bud Wiggins, drifts aimlessly in and out of the lives of others and from one script idea to another. Moonlighting as a limo driver to pay his bills, he finds himself immersed in a world of vanity and degradation.

Wagner infuses his novel with the familiar archetypical characters of Hollywood—a nihilistic producer, an aging film star, an obnoxious mogul—and exposes the madness that drives them all. 
 

About the Author

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Bruce Wagner has written twelve novels and bestsellers, including the famous “Cellphone Trilogy,” (I’m Losing You, I’ll Let You Go and Still Holding), Dead Stars, The Empty Chair, and the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Chrysanthemum Palace. He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg’s 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 the acclaimed Tracey Ullman’sState of the Union. He has written essays and articles for the New York Times, Artforum and the New Yorker.
 

Praise For…

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

"[Wagner's The 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 Stars is] 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