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Dead Stars
Dead Stars is Bruce Wagner’s ( I'm Losing You) most lavish and remarkable translation yet of the national 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 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.
604 pages, Hardcover
First published August 2, 2012
55 people are currently reading
2150 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Wagner
32 books162 followersBruce 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 finalist); I'm Losing You; and Force Majeure. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
June 4, 2014
Man. First book of my "Abandoned" Goodreads list. I made it about 180 pages in, enough to feel like I'd given it a run, but enough was enough.
Right off the bat the visual aesthetic of this novel drove me apeshit: The use of multiple fonts in a single page (even in dialogue, so when a character says a certain actor's name, said name will appear in a script font), the switching off of quotation marks and em dashes to denote dialogue (again, within a single chapter), the multiple tense shifts and typographic errors... from an editorial standpoint, this book is a hot mess. I'm sure something could be said about the allegorical nature of the novel and how it relates to the country's downward spiral in language cohesion, etc. Sure thing. But it came across, rather than exuberant or intentional, as careless.
Much more importantly, it's just hands-down the ugliest book I've ever tried to read. Just a ceaselessly vile, ugly, one-dimensional piece of work. I mean, I feel like I get the intent, coming across as a kind of lampooning zeitgeist of the internet age, and America's obsession with fame. But for the most part it's simply a gleefully violent, repetitive, misogynistic, hateful, graphic collection of anecdotes as told by an armada of self-obsessed turds. Sheesh. Finally had to shelve this one.
Right off the bat the visual aesthetic of this novel drove me apeshit: The use of multiple fonts in a single page (even in dialogue, so when a character says a certain actor's name, said name will appear in a script font), the switching off of quotation marks and em dashes to denote dialogue (again, within a single chapter), the multiple tense shifts and typographic errors... from an editorial standpoint, this book is a hot mess. I'm sure something could be said about the allegorical nature of the novel and how it relates to the country's downward spiral in language cohesion, etc. Sure thing. But it came across, rather than exuberant or intentional, as careless.
Much more importantly, it's just hands-down the ugliest book I've ever tried to read. Just a ceaselessly vile, ugly, one-dimensional piece of work. I mean, I feel like I get the intent, coming across as a kind of lampooning zeitgeist of the internet age, and America's obsession with fame. But for the most part it's simply a gleefully violent, repetitive, misogynistic, hateful, graphic collection of anecdotes as told by an armada of self-obsessed turds. Sheesh. Finally had to shelve this one.
March 29, 2020
Read through this a third time! A read I can always zip through. It should be illegal to publish a book without demonstrating as much enjoyment for writing as Wagner does! Just read through my previous review below as well. Seems like I used to be smarter :P
I can add this: Gene Wolfe said that the mark of a literary work is that its pleasure increases when you re-read it. This is one of my favourite works of literature because I always get something new from it.
In this case an interesting idea towards the end: when the stars die, they still give off light long afterwards, and we here on Earth may not notice for a long time that they have already gone. This is presented as a beautiful idea about the power of movie stars. But "Stars" are also shorthand for "heaven" or any kind of meaningful upward aspiration, in this novel. (As revealed by the quotes of Dante that begin each section--irritatingly kept in Italian--thanks, google translate point-your-camera-at-it feature!) Wagner is suggesting that meaning is long dead in this culture but the people have yet to notice. And does so in such a clever and playful manner that you can't help but take pleasure in this idea, even while his mother characters are imbued with such empathy. What a genius. I want to read everything this guy ever wrote.
Second read-through review:
ACTUALLY FINISHED:
Omg, that ending was perfect, the way it so unified the novel's themes. And it won me back around, because the story threads didn't tie up as neatly as I thought they could have—as neatly as I thought Wagner capable of given his expositional power. But much like DFW's Infinite Jest (a book Bruce Wagner reveals inside that he's never read, though I find that hard to believe), the novel doesn't end when the story ends but once the themes, or "keywords" even, have been exhausted. The main "keywords" of Dead Stars that I identified are: "dead" and "star" of course, also "mother", "cancer", "child", "shit." (Maybe "novel" and "media" also.) These words combined and split off from one another in all their meanings to weave together a dark, bleak and often schadenfreude-rich tapestry of contemporary Hollywood, filled with dead stars, mothers of cancerous children, mothers who photograph dead children, constipated mothers who give birth to shits (and emotionally constipated mothers who gave birth to shitty children), cancerous children who chase dying stars, those who die before they can become stars, stars with cancer who birth shit movies, shitty people suckling at the teats of mother stars, a meditation on the light of stars in the sky burning after the stars die... All these combinations rolling around in your head with page after page of miraculous wordplay. As I mention below, that Bruce's stand-in Wiggins features in this book is testament to his understanding that by writing about it he becomes part of it, like a GI surgeon artfully deconstructing pathologies but spending his days wading in shit.
I watched an interview with him about this book and he mentioned James Joyce as an influence in terms of the text games and wordplay, and there is a Ulyssean modernist epic feel to this book, as well as some Molly Bloom-style reveries. And also, what with Wagner's obsession with wanting to be known as one of the greats, the Paris Review interviews and Franzen Big Think videos on YouTube and Nobel prize-tracking, I'm sure he came across Styron's quote about Finnegans Wake, that the poetry of its last pages is lost to humanity because they're so tough to get to. Which is why Wagner puts in a jab at Franzen, for suggesting that DFW killed himself as a career move, towards the very end of this book, with an almost a priori understanding that most people wouldn't make it that far!
It really was a dumbass thing for Franzen to suggest. If "greatness" isn't relative, Franzen's got nothing on DFW. There's a real coldness to F and his prose in general, and if he was upset by DFW's departure, it seems mostly for the inconvenience of it and what the loss of a sparring partner would mean for his own career. If Franzen had a caveat, it's that he's like a literary robot. He takes the archetypes of previous classics, replaces the references with stuff like "quinoa", "YouTube" and "North Korea" and sends it back out again. DFW's caveat was pointed out to me by a friend: he needed the kind of help that pharmaceuticals, and not literature, should've provided. When he wrote characters, it was like, "You know that way when you've stayed up all night cutting yourself because your child is dead, you've driven away all women for good and can't see them as people anymore and your rapist neighbour--" whoah whoah whoah... Your wordplay is on point, mate, but maybe talk to a professional before you sit back down at the keyboard—this isn't as relatable as you think it is. Though I must admit I gravitate towards cold male prose, with unreliable narrators and unlikeable characters—but that demonstrates technical excellence, so you forgive its lack of warmth—because I think that's what I excel at best as a writer. I'm aware of its shortcomings, but what can you do.
I've just realised now that even though he obsesses over Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, William Styron, David Simon—there's a notable absence of Bret Easton Ellis, whose subject matter most closely mirrors Wagner's. Is it that Wagner's envy of BEE is so omnipresent as to be come a diffuse white noise throughout the text rather than someone whose name was worth calling out; or, that Wagner considers himself so out of BEE's league (he is) that he didn't even think to mention him? Both. Definitely both.
Why isn't Wagner yet considered one of the greats? Possibly people think he squanders his gifts writing about such superficial matter. As he shows, gold isn't always about depth; rich seams can be strip-mined from a surface. Though it doesn't matter as much to us that we understand the minutiae of why his subject matter is so horrendous. Most of us dismiss it out of hand and move in cleverer directions before we have a chance to learn. It's a weak target, perhaps. But Wagner knows that: he's just having too much fun tearing it apart.
FIRST ATTEMPT:
At first it did seem as cruel as it was made out to be, and I wondered why yet again I was reading one of those "Didya know LA is shallow?!" books. (Seriously why though?) But once I got into the flow of Wagner's ebullient, maximalist, riffing, wordplay-packed prose, I found this fucking hilarious! This is the book Ellis' Glamorama wants to be. I suspect Wagner wrote it with that in mind, conscious as he appears to be of other males around his age and how their work is received. It may also be a capstone for Wallace's humourless and dry "The Suffering Channel": Wagner's saying, "Well done, you've mapped out the dimensions of our sinking ship, but, mate: you forgot to sing!"
Fucked-up snuff, websites that pay for celebrity snatch shots, a kid who uses her status as the youngest-ever cancer survivor as currency to try and make herself famous, a former child soldier who
sells out to advise on a madcap romp film based on his experiences—oh but that's the other thing! The mothers of these out and out terrors—who, as bad as they get, are painted as simply naive and dumb in a culture that's far bigger and more pervasive than they're capable of recognising with their starblinded eyes (though you might miss that if you're too offended or disgusted)—are deeply sympathetic characters who are trying to do their best. Wagner knows that there's a shred of unshreddable decency somewhere always, whereas his younger more nihilistic contemporaries, in pursuit of a non-existent reality, often throw verisimilitude aside.
I think it's that Wagner's screenplay for Maps to the Stars (which I loved!! LA is shallow: why do I keep giving a shit?!) was helmed by coldmeister Cronenberg, which would have people thinking this novel is similarly callous or isolating. It just depends how dark your sense of humour is!
But it seems that Wagner is aware that the only thing more pointless than LA shallowness is wasting your time documenting it in your own art. And that's why his alias features as a character in this book, I think. You can't write about this stuff without being it yourself.
I don't think I've ever seen someone have so much fun with their story, and it's highly quotable.
It was a book that I actually got excited to wake up and read in the morning, but the pacing lost me, and the sugary prose maxed me out about halfway in. I'll take a breather and dive back in.
Though I might buy a copy and come back to it. You know what? I'm buying a copy of this. I need to sit and study it. It's too good.
Had you heard of it? I hadn't.
I can add this: Gene Wolfe said that the mark of a literary work is that its pleasure increases when you re-read it. This is one of my favourite works of literature because I always get something new from it.
In this case an interesting idea towards the end: when the stars die, they still give off light long afterwards, and we here on Earth may not notice for a long time that they have already gone. This is presented as a beautiful idea about the power of movie stars. But "Stars" are also shorthand for "heaven" or any kind of meaningful upward aspiration, in this novel. (As revealed by the quotes of Dante that begin each section--irritatingly kept in Italian--thanks, google translate point-your-camera-at-it feature!) Wagner is suggesting that meaning is long dead in this culture but the people have yet to notice. And does so in such a clever and playful manner that you can't help but take pleasure in this idea, even while his mother characters are imbued with such empathy. What a genius. I want to read everything this guy ever wrote.
Second read-through review:
ACTUALLY FINISHED:
Omg, that ending was perfect, the way it so unified the novel's themes. And it won me back around, because the story threads didn't tie up as neatly as I thought they could have—as neatly as I thought Wagner capable of given his expositional power. But much like DFW's Infinite Jest (a book Bruce Wagner reveals inside that he's never read, though I find that hard to believe), the novel doesn't end when the story ends but once the themes, or "keywords" even, have been exhausted. The main "keywords" of Dead Stars that I identified are: "dead" and "star" of course, also "mother", "cancer", "child", "shit." (Maybe "novel" and "media" also.) These words combined and split off from one another in all their meanings to weave together a dark, bleak and often schadenfreude-rich tapestry of contemporary Hollywood, filled with dead stars, mothers of cancerous children, mothers who photograph dead children, constipated mothers who give birth to shits (and emotionally constipated mothers who gave birth to shitty children), cancerous children who chase dying stars, those who die before they can become stars, stars with cancer who birth shit movies, shitty people suckling at the teats of mother stars, a meditation on the light of stars in the sky burning after the stars die... All these combinations rolling around in your head with page after page of miraculous wordplay. As I mention below, that Bruce's stand-in Wiggins features in this book is testament to his understanding that by writing about it he becomes part of it, like a GI surgeon artfully deconstructing pathologies but spending his days wading in shit.
I watched an interview with him about this book and he mentioned James Joyce as an influence in terms of the text games and wordplay, and there is a Ulyssean modernist epic feel to this book, as well as some Molly Bloom-style reveries. And also, what with Wagner's obsession with wanting to be known as one of the greats, the Paris Review interviews and Franzen Big Think videos on YouTube and Nobel prize-tracking, I'm sure he came across Styron's quote about Finnegans Wake, that the poetry of its last pages is lost to humanity because they're so tough to get to. Which is why Wagner puts in a jab at Franzen, for suggesting that DFW killed himself as a career move, towards the very end of this book, with an almost a priori understanding that most people wouldn't make it that far!
It really was a dumbass thing for Franzen to suggest. If "greatness" isn't relative, Franzen's got nothing on DFW. There's a real coldness to F and his prose in general, and if he was upset by DFW's departure, it seems mostly for the inconvenience of it and what the loss of a sparring partner would mean for his own career. If Franzen had a caveat, it's that he's like a literary robot. He takes the archetypes of previous classics, replaces the references with stuff like "quinoa", "YouTube" and "North Korea" and sends it back out again. DFW's caveat was pointed out to me by a friend: he needed the kind of help that pharmaceuticals, and not literature, should've provided. When he wrote characters, it was like, "You know that way when you've stayed up all night cutting yourself because your child is dead, you've driven away all women for good and can't see them as people anymore and your rapist neighbour--" whoah whoah whoah... Your wordplay is on point, mate, but maybe talk to a professional before you sit back down at the keyboard—this isn't as relatable as you think it is. Though I must admit I gravitate towards cold male prose, with unreliable narrators and unlikeable characters—but that demonstrates technical excellence, so you forgive its lack of warmth—because I think that's what I excel at best as a writer. I'm aware of its shortcomings, but what can you do.
I've just realised now that even though he obsesses over Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, William Styron, David Simon—there's a notable absence of Bret Easton Ellis, whose subject matter most closely mirrors Wagner's. Is it that Wagner's envy of BEE is so omnipresent as to be come a diffuse white noise throughout the text rather than someone whose name was worth calling out; or, that Wagner considers himself so out of BEE's league (he is) that he didn't even think to mention him? Both. Definitely both.
Why isn't Wagner yet considered one of the greats? Possibly people think he squanders his gifts writing about such superficial matter. As he shows, gold isn't always about depth; rich seams can be strip-mined from a surface. Though it doesn't matter as much to us that we understand the minutiae of why his subject matter is so horrendous. Most of us dismiss it out of hand and move in cleverer directions before we have a chance to learn. It's a weak target, perhaps. But Wagner knows that: he's just having too much fun tearing it apart.
FIRST ATTEMPT:
At first it did seem as cruel as it was made out to be, and I wondered why yet again I was reading one of those "Didya know LA is shallow?!" books. (Seriously why though?) But once I got into the flow of Wagner's ebullient, maximalist, riffing, wordplay-packed prose, I found this fucking hilarious! This is the book Ellis' Glamorama wants to be. I suspect Wagner wrote it with that in mind, conscious as he appears to be of other males around his age and how their work is received. It may also be a capstone for Wallace's humourless and dry "The Suffering Channel": Wagner's saying, "Well done, you've mapped out the dimensions of our sinking ship, but, mate: you forgot to sing!"
Fucked-up snuff, websites that pay for celebrity snatch shots, a kid who uses her status as the youngest-ever cancer survivor as currency to try and make herself famous, a former child soldier who
sells out to advise on a madcap romp film based on his experiences—oh but that's the other thing! The mothers of these out and out terrors—who, as bad as they get, are painted as simply naive and dumb in a culture that's far bigger and more pervasive than they're capable of recognising with their starblinded eyes (though you might miss that if you're too offended or disgusted)—are deeply sympathetic characters who are trying to do their best. Wagner knows that there's a shred of unshreddable decency somewhere always, whereas his younger more nihilistic contemporaries, in pursuit of a non-existent reality, often throw verisimilitude aside.
I think it's that Wagner's screenplay for Maps to the Stars (which I loved!! LA is shallow: why do I keep giving a shit?!) was helmed by coldmeister Cronenberg, which would have people thinking this novel is similarly callous or isolating. It just depends how dark your sense of humour is!
But it seems that Wagner is aware that the only thing more pointless than LA shallowness is wasting your time documenting it in your own art. And that's why his alias features as a character in this book, I think. You can't write about this stuff without being it yourself.
I don't think I've ever seen someone have so much fun with their story, and it's highly quotable.
It was a book that I actually got excited to wake up and read in the morning, but the pacing lost me, and the sugary prose maxed me out about halfway in. I'll take a breather and dive back in.
Though I might buy a copy and come back to it. You know what? I'm buying a copy of this. I need to sit and study it. It's too good.
Had you heard of it? I hadn't.
January 28, 2015
“It doesn't really matter if you are left behind the back, but what matters is your capacity to pull and push everyone by your way to get to the front.”
----Michael Bassey Johnson, a Nigerian poet, playwright, novelist, aphorist, satirist, caricaturist and a newspaper columnist
Bruce Wagner, the American novelist, penned a very much controversial novel about the tinsel town called, Dead Stars featuring stardom with a violent background, provoking us to move foreword with it's flow, no matter how hard the road is.
Synopsis:
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…
What a book! After reading this book, I feel that probably Bruce Wagner has something against the life of people in and around Hollywood! My God! He just ripped down the whole tinsel town with his thoroughly satirical yet hart-breaking novel, Dead Stars.
Warning: If you can handle a filthy read that will screw up your brain, the definitely go for it. Otherwise, you might slam the book hard across the wall.
What I felt is that the plot is woven by the author keeping in mind that he would purely ridicule his readers or make us laugh over bad jokes or the otherwise cannot be true since Bruce Wagner is definitely a fantastic writer. While reading, I was totally caught off-guard with Wagner's sardonic undertone tightly wrapped up in this multi-layered storyline.
This story revolves around the 21st century American obsession with fame. The characters are real and striking- completely wasted in short. And the author have explained them with such intricacy that even though they will disgust you, but since you have learnt everything from their back-story to sob story with much greater depth, they will manage to enthrall you till it's very end.
Most people have hated this book till date, but when I heard that this book's movie adaption is soon going to hit the screens, I instantly purchased it online. Well, to be honest, I never read anything so raunchy and ridiculous like Wagner's Dead Stars ever before. This book will be your ultimate guidebook to the darkest world in Hollywood. At times, I was pulling my hair as to why did I ever purchased it and who will be so interested to watch it on the screen if they can't handle it's original version. Too much sex, over the top drug usage, teenage pregnancy, porn world, illicit affairs, 'text slang', sometimes it will make you enjoy the roller coaster ride of hormones and emotions but at the other times, you might feel like throwing up.
The language sometimes it is very evocative and at times, it can be pure garbage and will hit you like an unexpected snowstorm- hard and cold. Sometimes it will arrest your mind and at other times, it will make you feel ordinary. I never knew people can act so crazily to achieve stardom and Wagner has projected Hollywood in a really bad light. Well, my thoughts were never provoked even for once.
Verdict: Only read it if you can handle bad plots and raunchy characters.
Movie Info:
Starring: Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, and Robert Pattinson
Release Date: February 27, 2015
Note: The movie will be titled Maps to the Stars.
----Michael Bassey Johnson, a Nigerian poet, playwright, novelist, aphorist, satirist, caricaturist and a newspaper columnist
Bruce Wagner, the American novelist, penned a very much controversial novel about the tinsel town called, Dead Stars featuring stardom with a violent background, provoking us to move foreword with it's flow, no matter how hard the road is.
Synopsis:
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…
What a book! After reading this book, I feel that probably Bruce Wagner has something against the life of people in and around Hollywood! My God! He just ripped down the whole tinsel town with his thoroughly satirical yet hart-breaking novel, Dead Stars.
Warning: If you can handle a filthy read that will screw up your brain, the definitely go for it. Otherwise, you might slam the book hard across the wall.
What I felt is that the plot is woven by the author keeping in mind that he would purely ridicule his readers or make us laugh over bad jokes or the otherwise cannot be true since Bruce Wagner is definitely a fantastic writer. While reading, I was totally caught off-guard with Wagner's sardonic undertone tightly wrapped up in this multi-layered storyline.
This story revolves around the 21st century American obsession with fame. The characters are real and striking- completely wasted in short. And the author have explained them with such intricacy that even though they will disgust you, but since you have learnt everything from their back-story to sob story with much greater depth, they will manage to enthrall you till it's very end.
Most people have hated this book till date, but when I heard that this book's movie adaption is soon going to hit the screens, I instantly purchased it online. Well, to be honest, I never read anything so raunchy and ridiculous like Wagner's Dead Stars ever before. This book will be your ultimate guidebook to the darkest world in Hollywood. At times, I was pulling my hair as to why did I ever purchased it and who will be so interested to watch it on the screen if they can't handle it's original version. Too much sex, over the top drug usage, teenage pregnancy, porn world, illicit affairs, 'text slang', sometimes it will make you enjoy the roller coaster ride of hormones and emotions but at the other times, you might feel like throwing up.
The language sometimes it is very evocative and at times, it can be pure garbage and will hit you like an unexpected snowstorm- hard and cold. Sometimes it will arrest your mind and at other times, it will make you feel ordinary. I never knew people can act so crazily to achieve stardom and Wagner has projected Hollywood in a really bad light. Well, my thoughts were never provoked even for once.
Verdict: Only read it if you can handle bad plots and raunchy characters.
Movie Info:
Starring: Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, and Robert Pattinson
Release Date: February 27, 2015
Note: The movie will be titled Maps to the Stars.
March 7, 2013
This book was like a tug of war inside my head
as I grimaced, laughed, and read.
There are touches of brilliance,
patches of pedantic,
and many moments of huh?
It's like pop culture burp
that is both amusing and offensive,
daft and entertaining,
all at once.
It is so deep and so profoundly shallow,
it’s like an Oreo with a sour cream center.
I would say this is a book
I will have to read again
because
somehow it’s worth the headache.
Oops, almost forgot,
got this from the
Goodreads First Read Program,
er, ummm, thanks?
as I grimaced, laughed, and read.
There are touches of brilliance,
patches of pedantic,
and many moments of huh?
It's like pop culture burp
that is both amusing and offensive,
daft and entertaining,
all at once.
It is so deep and so profoundly shallow,
it’s like an Oreo with a sour cream center.
I would say this is a book
I will have to read again
because
somehow it’s worth the headache.
Oops, almost forgot,
got this from the
Goodreads First Read Program,
er, ummm, thanks?
October 26, 2012
Bruce Wagner has a deep, dark secret: he's just a marshmallow inside. No matter how depraved or disgusting his characters' behavior may be, we stay with the narrative because he has made us care about the characters and what happens to them. This is no mean feat.
Fans of Wagner will place this novel among his best. It contains Wagner's trademark dazzling wordplay, with multi-layered puns, invented words, and divinely inspired gibberish. I had to laugh out loud at some of his wickedly inventive riffs on language.
Wagner's social commentary is also as sharp as ever. I loved one character's assessment of the careers of Joyce Carol Oates, Fran Lebowitz, and Jonathan Franzen. Of course stars of stage, screen, and TV are vilified also. There's hardly an aspect of our out-of-control poptrash culture that goes unscathed in this funny, sometimes disturbing book.
Fans of Wagner will place this novel among his best. It contains Wagner's trademark dazzling wordplay, with multi-layered puns, invented words, and divinely inspired gibberish. I had to laugh out loud at some of his wickedly inventive riffs on language.
Wagner's social commentary is also as sharp as ever. I loved one character's assessment of the careers of Joyce Carol Oates, Fran Lebowitz, and Jonathan Franzen. Of course stars of stage, screen, and TV are vilified also. There's hardly an aspect of our out-of-control poptrash culture that goes unscathed in this funny, sometimes disturbing book.
October 4, 2012
MICHIKO KAKUTANI of the New York Times said of Dead Stars:
'Stomach-turning, sick-making, rancid, repugnant, repellent, squalid, odious, fetid, disgusting — there is a thesaurus full of terms to describe the contents of Bruce Wagner’s willfully offensive new novel, “Dead Stars.”'
I've read about 60 pages, and am not sure how I made it this far, and I'd like to find the review that caused me to pick up this book so I could make certain never to read anything that reviewer likes again. This is one book that has no chance of being overdue at the library - I can't wait to get it out of my house.
'Stomach-turning, sick-making, rancid, repugnant, repellent, squalid, odious, fetid, disgusting — there is a thesaurus full of terms to describe the contents of Bruce Wagner’s willfully offensive new novel, “Dead Stars.”'
I've read about 60 pages, and am not sure how I made it this far, and I'd like to find the review that caused me to pick up this book so I could make certain never to read anything that reviewer likes again. This is one book that has no chance of being overdue at the library - I can't wait to get it out of my house.
February 5, 2015
This book is 600 pages of suffering (by the reader) waiting for it to be over. I've never been so upset with myself for finishing a book. I forced myself through every insane page of drug induced ramblings by flat, boring characters in the hope that it couldn't get worse. Maybe I'm just not deep enough to understand this witty commentary on our current society and their obsession with empty fame and the Kardashians but if this book is any indication, I'm fine with that. To be fair, I could tolerate the passages around Telma, but even Bud and Gwen, relatively sane characters, lost me in their own chapter long ramblings of whatever entered their heads, a stream of consciousness style that, unlike Jack Kerouac, utterly fails to ever be interesting. Jerzy was the worst. I would not recommend this book to anyone, except as punishment.
July 25, 2012
Reviewing this book is puzzling... I haven't read anything quite like it. After 600 pages or so, I am still not sure if I liked it or hated it. Felt like an american pop culture overdose. The storyline in itself is interesting but there is something in the treatment that didn't worked for me. There is way too much references to actors/tv shows for my taste, not being very interested in all the gossips around it. There a lot of different characters, each of them having their own level of language . Some parts are beautifully written while I found other boring or even annoying by the vulgarity of it. The overall feeling is unequal... I received a copy through FirstReads Giveaway and I was glad to discover the work of an author I didn't know. Although confused about this one, I would like to read something else from Bruce Wagner in the future.
June 24, 2015
People are Animals.
And by people I mean Bruce Wagner. Bruce, in your little author cottage locked away from society do you spend time watching porn and masturbating, then call it "research" for your epic novel on humanity?
You must have because I can honestly think of no other reason you would write such pornographic, nasty garbage. Bruce, if you were trying to shock and awe your audience to make a name for yourself I suppose you succeeded, because I will remember your work. This is not because it was well-written or worthwhile, but because I was so throughly disgusted by the inventive swear words, child sex innuendos and selfish, naive behavior of your characters. You have dug a hole so deep for yourself I doubt you can ever clean out the shit you wrote out of your mind.
As an author you live and breathe your work and spend countless hours writing and editing. Bruce, you must be a true martyr to 1) be able to read this without vomiting and 2) be able to read this more than once to edit it.
I don't mind some swearing, it adds to the emotion and feeling in a novel. It makes the scenes realistic. I get it, people swear. BUT that doesn't mean I want to read about Emma Watson's crotch for page after page, or listen to a play by play on how a mother, with very little prodding, sold her daughter's childhood for a short career as a photographer. Bruce I wonder how much "research" you had to complete to write such detailed descriptions on these inappropriate and insulting topics. Did your editor even read this over or did he just skip huge sections because he just couldn't be bothered to read the words "fuck", "tit" or "porn" one more time?
If the plot and writing couldn't save this novel, I was hoping the characters could. Bruce, you let me down. There was nothing redeeming about any of the characters. Each one had no morale foundation and had the emotional inner workings of a five-year-old. If I wanted to spend time with these types of people, I would have stayed in high school and gotten high for the rest of my life. Maybe that is what I did wrong, I should have smoked before I read this. Bruce, is that where your money goes: weed, cocaine, and heroin? Maybe this was part of your "research" in your path to becoming a distinguished author.
Bruce, your tasteless writing just isn't for me. But if anyone loves random TMZ references, obsessions with famous people, and enough swear words to kill a small elephant, this book is for you!
And by people I mean Bruce Wagner. Bruce, in your little author cottage locked away from society do you spend time watching porn and masturbating, then call it "research" for your epic novel on humanity?
You must have because I can honestly think of no other reason you would write such pornographic, nasty garbage. Bruce, if you were trying to shock and awe your audience to make a name for yourself I suppose you succeeded, because I will remember your work. This is not because it was well-written or worthwhile, but because I was so throughly disgusted by the inventive swear words, child sex innuendos and selfish, naive behavior of your characters. You have dug a hole so deep for yourself I doubt you can ever clean out the shit you wrote out of your mind.
As an author you live and breathe your work and spend countless hours writing and editing. Bruce, you must be a true martyr to 1) be able to read this without vomiting and 2) be able to read this more than once to edit it.
I don't mind some swearing, it adds to the emotion and feeling in a novel. It makes the scenes realistic. I get it, people swear. BUT that doesn't mean I want to read about Emma Watson's crotch for page after page, or listen to a play by play on how a mother, with very little prodding, sold her daughter's childhood for a short career as a photographer. Bruce I wonder how much "research" you had to complete to write such detailed descriptions on these inappropriate and insulting topics. Did your editor even read this over or did he just skip huge sections because he just couldn't be bothered to read the words "fuck", "tit" or "porn" one more time?
If the plot and writing couldn't save this novel, I was hoping the characters could. Bruce, you let me down. There was nothing redeeming about any of the characters. Each one had no morale foundation and had the emotional inner workings of a five-year-old. If I wanted to spend time with these types of people, I would have stayed in high school and gotten high for the rest of my life. Maybe that is what I did wrong, I should have smoked before I read this. Bruce, is that where your money goes: weed, cocaine, and heroin? Maybe this was part of your "research" in your path to becoming a distinguished author.
Bruce, your tasteless writing just isn't for me. But if anyone loves random TMZ references, obsessions with famous people, and enough swear words to kill a small elephant, this book is for you!
October 6, 2012
I am not sure what this book is exactly, but I thoroughly enjoy it. I almost gave up during the first several chapters as it seemed needlessly pornographic. I felt like I was being dragged through an ugly universe I didn’t want any part of. You are what you eat, and your brain is what you read, and I didn’t like to dwell on some of this stuff for too long. I’m no school boy, but some of the stuff was just plain crude, rude and repulsive. But I hung in there - primarily because the book recieved such good reviews - and I am glad I did. The clean parts are superb and sadly, I actually got inured to the filth - and the world these characters inhabit. Maybe that was the point.
Wagner does a masterful job weaving together the sordid lives of so many characters and makes it damn interesting. It was Dickensian in scope and depth. All the disparate but connected characters bring a different perspective from their pathetically sad world – and some of them are based on real people. Not sure how Michael Douglass must feel about this whole thing. My favorite parts of the novel are Bud Wiggins, a failed novelist’s, devastating observations regarding the highfalutin pretensions of the current crop of “hip” American authors; to include Franzen, Wallace, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others. I am not sure Franzen or Oates will be buying Wagner a drink at the bar during their next meeting.
Don't get me wrong, some of this book is laugh-out-loud funny. I wouldn't want Wagner roasting me. His digs are acerbic, cuttingly elegant and spot-on. And some of the writing and trenchant observations are sublime: "Because for an actor, the sudden fame was a crucible, perilous as a slow fade to obscurity. The only fates possible for a supernova were joining a constellation or falling out of the sky." ...lots of references to 'stars', etc. throughout.
When I was done, I tried to think what it was really all about and to me it seemed like the search for a maternal bond in a twisted world. All the characters, in some way, seem to be desperately trying to find maternal solace and meaning, to “connect”, through the oppressive, negative, soul sucking, materialistic, pointless and puerile world of Wagner’s Hollywood. Dawn and Reeyona, Reeyona and Jacquie, Gwen and Telma, Telma and Biggie, and perhaps most poignant of all, Biggie seraching for his mother who abandoned them and loves spelunking by googling caves throughout the world. All are striving for a real human connection and meaning in a meaningless world.
Wagner does a masterful job weaving together the sordid lives of so many characters and makes it damn interesting. It was Dickensian in scope and depth. All the disparate but connected characters bring a different perspective from their pathetically sad world – and some of them are based on real people. Not sure how Michael Douglass must feel about this whole thing. My favorite parts of the novel are Bud Wiggins, a failed novelist’s, devastating observations regarding the highfalutin pretensions of the current crop of “hip” American authors; to include Franzen, Wallace, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others. I am not sure Franzen or Oates will be buying Wagner a drink at the bar during their next meeting.
Don't get me wrong, some of this book is laugh-out-loud funny. I wouldn't want Wagner roasting me. His digs are acerbic, cuttingly elegant and spot-on. And some of the writing and trenchant observations are sublime: "Because for an actor, the sudden fame was a crucible, perilous as a slow fade to obscurity. The only fates possible for a supernova were joining a constellation or falling out of the sky." ...lots of references to 'stars', etc. throughout.
When I was done, I tried to think what it was really all about and to me it seemed like the search for a maternal bond in a twisted world. All the characters, in some way, seem to be desperately trying to find maternal solace and meaning, to “connect”, through the oppressive, negative, soul sucking, materialistic, pointless and puerile world of Wagner’s Hollywood. Dawn and Reeyona, Reeyona and Jacquie, Gwen and Telma, Telma and Biggie, and perhaps most poignant of all, Biggie seraching for his mother who abandoned them and loves spelunking by googling caves throughout the world. All are striving for a real human connection and meaning in a meaningless world.
August 27, 2012
After the first few chapters of any novel a reader always has a choice: continue reading or not? Now that I've finished Dead Stars, I almost feel as complicit as Bruce Wagner in spending time on a world as disgusting as he makes his seem.
In several earlier books, Wagner has skewered Hollywood and its movie industry culture like no one since Nathanael West. This one goes below and beyond. It's a profane, ferocious take on reality stars, pornography and our current celebrity worship that elevates the likes of the Kardashians to tabloid headliners.
How do you outdo the over-the-top activities of such unworthy, unlikeable people when it seems like every issue of People and every episode of Big Brother are already rendering them self-satires? In this case, the answer is a 600+ page novel of surpassing raunch that mixes in the real (Michael Douglas and his bout with cancer) and the could-be-real-but-is-not (Telma, a gushingly upbeat adolescent who aggressively parlays being the youngest living breast cancer survivor into fame.)
Other stars in Wagner's new universe are Jerzy, a youthful paparazzo; his pregnant sister Reeyonna; both offspring of a mother who has earned her fame by taking naked photos of her daughter as a child; and Reeyonna's boyfriend Rikki, an orphaned young man addicted to multiple drugs and porn. Among those with featured roles are everyone from Betty White to Bud Wiggins, the latter a screenwriter who made his first appearance in Wagner's Force Majeure.
Why bother? The answer is language. The wordplay-filled and emoticon-laced text is an operatic extravaganza that reads as if it were created by this bombastic but morbidly fascinated writer on an extended meth-driven bender. There are a million clever hooks, many of them linked to the latest internet jargon, such as supertitling each chapter either EXPLICIT or CLEAN a la iTunes.
Because it is so pitched to today's fleeting frenzies,I wonder whether Dead Stars will hold up in a year or five. For now, it is the last word (or 500,000) on a scene we all abhor and help perpetuate.
In several earlier books, Wagner has skewered Hollywood and its movie industry culture like no one since Nathanael West. This one goes below and beyond. It's a profane, ferocious take on reality stars, pornography and our current celebrity worship that elevates the likes of the Kardashians to tabloid headliners.
How do you outdo the over-the-top activities of such unworthy, unlikeable people when it seems like every issue of People and every episode of Big Brother are already rendering them self-satires? In this case, the answer is a 600+ page novel of surpassing raunch that mixes in the real (Michael Douglas and his bout with cancer) and the could-be-real-but-is-not (Telma, a gushingly upbeat adolescent who aggressively parlays being the youngest living breast cancer survivor into fame.)
Other stars in Wagner's new universe are Jerzy, a youthful paparazzo; his pregnant sister Reeyonna; both offspring of a mother who has earned her fame by taking naked photos of her daughter as a child; and Reeyonna's boyfriend Rikki, an orphaned young man addicted to multiple drugs and porn. Among those with featured roles are everyone from Betty White to Bud Wiggins, the latter a screenwriter who made his first appearance in Wagner's Force Majeure.
Why bother? The answer is language. The wordplay-filled and emoticon-laced text is an operatic extravaganza that reads as if it were created by this bombastic but morbidly fascinated writer on an extended meth-driven bender. There are a million clever hooks, many of them linked to the latest internet jargon, such as supertitling each chapter either EXPLICIT or CLEAN a la iTunes.
Because it is so pitched to today's fleeting frenzies,I wonder whether Dead Stars will hold up in a year or five. For now, it is the last word (or 500,000) on a scene we all abhor and help perpetuate.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 31, 2012
A satire on Hollywood agents, actors, writers, directors, rich kids, poor kids, mothers, lesbians, porn stars, porn addicts, cancer-survivors, desperate people searching for 15 minutes of fame, and all the riff raff in between. If Tom Wolfe wrote "A Bonfire of Vanities" set in Hollywood, this is what it would sound like. If Tom Wolfe was doing crack while he was writing it.
The story follows alternately and mostly without connection the lives of : Michael Douglas ( the movie star), Reeyona, a pregnant teen and her mother Jacquie, a failed photographer; Rikki, (Reeyona's baby daddy) who watches internet porn and takes drugs all day; Jerzy, (Reeyona's brother) a sleazy photographer who specializes in crotch shots of famous young women getting out of cars; Telma, a 10 year-old cancer survivor who capitalizes on her illness to meet all the stars, and a few other minor players.
At times I felt like I was reading in a foreign language: there were so many references that meant absolutely nothing to me, leading me to believe that there are a whole lot of cultures in my own backyard that I have no idea about. I learned things about drugs and pornography that shocked and amazed me. I cannot really recommend the book to anyone I know, yet I cannot get it out of my mind. Suffice it to say: if you are young and wild or if you want to know what young and wild people are up to, read this book. If you have a weak stomach, stay away.
The story follows alternately and mostly without connection the lives of : Michael Douglas ( the movie star), Reeyona, a pregnant teen and her mother Jacquie, a failed photographer; Rikki, (Reeyona's baby daddy) who watches internet porn and takes drugs all day; Jerzy, (Reeyona's brother) a sleazy photographer who specializes in crotch shots of famous young women getting out of cars; Telma, a 10 year-old cancer survivor who capitalizes on her illness to meet all the stars, and a few other minor players.
At times I felt like I was reading in a foreign language: there were so many references that meant absolutely nothing to me, leading me to believe that there are a whole lot of cultures in my own backyard that I have no idea about. I learned things about drugs and pornography that shocked and amazed me. I cannot really recommend the book to anyone I know, yet I cannot get it out of my mind. Suffice it to say: if you are young and wild or if you want to know what young and wild people are up to, read this book. If you have a weak stomach, stay away.
Read
July 20, 2022My first thought -- "oh, reminds me of Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars." I later find out that this was the book that inspired Wagner himself to write the screenplay to Maps to the Stars...
And well, as all of those one-(dead) star reviews down there suggest, it's not for everyone. Lurid descriptions of Hailee Steinfeld dragging her snatch across a limo seat are not for everyone. Nor are child cancer survivor influencers, professional Hollywood perverts, and so on and so forth. My soul is black and corrupted, so of course I adored it. What, you wanna see people being nice to each other? Go watch fucking Ted Lasso or something. If you want to see what the sucking vortex at the heart of the American cortex looks like, Dead Stars offers a vantage point.
And well, as all of those one-(dead) star reviews down there suggest, it's not for everyone. Lurid descriptions of Hailee Steinfeld dragging her snatch across a limo seat are not for everyone. Nor are child cancer survivor influencers, professional Hollywood perverts, and so on and so forth. My soul is black and corrupted, so of course I adored it. What, you wanna see people being nice to each other? Go watch fucking Ted Lasso or something. If you want to see what the sucking vortex at the heart of the American cortex looks like, Dead Stars offers a vantage point.
July 30, 2013
I am an extremely open minded reader. I read the reviews of this book, so I expected it to be a little out there. I got through about 200 pages and I had to put it down. It would be one thing if there were disgusting descriptions of pornography and other repulsive behavior ALONGSIDE some kind of plot, but there is NO PLOT. It is literally just the horrible, disgusting, thoughts of a bunch of horrible, disgusting people. I understand that it is supposed to be a commentary on the pornographic Hollywood culture of today, but it doesn't turn out that way in the least. After I read a sentence about a woman "vomiting feces" (I'm not kidding) that was it for me.
May 16, 2022
pretty much an unholy slog -- it's a satire so embedded in its subject that it appears almost uncorrupted from the deathly celebrity mind. that's both good and bad. it's good because there are few novels so authentically imagined in this voice; despite its setting being practically a decade old and its star jargon appropriately timed, i was shocked at how realistically the repulsive voices of these characters still read. the caustic gossip about the ins and outs of every rapper, singer, disney channel starlet and b lister ever known to man rings with naturalistic horror. but the vapidity and shallow dirge of hollywood also makes this thematically wimpy and not especially moving. that's the bad. i walked away with nothing new, the nightmare is deep and full, it spirals into a hairy drain of dead babies and looming pedophilia and meth gooning but the drain goes to no sewer. it is a cavern of nothing. surely what wagner was implying with the structure but nevertheless frustrating and empty empty empty
October 2, 2012
I wasn't sold for the first few chapters. But I tend to think about the apocalypse a lot (stay with me), and I've thought about something like an electromagnetic pulse wiping out all electronically stored information. So reading Dead Stars, I thought that if nothing else, this book will serve as an artifact of the digital voice. The proliferation of pop culture shorthand and initialisms in written communication. In many ways, this book is the gossip blog Oh No They Didn't in novel form.
But there's more to this book than intense, impressive stylistics. We get to know a constellation of characters through third person internal monologues, written as they would be in an email, a blog entry, a text. Possibly the most likeable character is the fictionalized Michael Douglas, whose measured, late-life voice is bitter sweet. The least-likeable is -- well, there's a multi-way tie for worst.
Every character is poisoned, to one extent or another, by fame. By having it, by wanting it, by being in proximity to it. Jerzy, a paparazzo eternally in search of underage "honeyshots" of car-exiting starlets for a particular collector. His pregnant teenage sister, Reeyonna, and her boyfriend Rikki, who believe that 15 minutes of fame is their birthright and the only possible solution to their problems. Reeyonna's mother, who once upon a time made her living exploiting her own child and finds herself pulled into a similar, irresistible eddy years later.
The indefatigable ten-year-old Telma gives us a glimpse into the cancer industrial complex. Bud Wiggins brings the glamorless workaday side of the entertainment business. Over all, the real-life famous people who appear in this book are treated more favourably than you'd expect and the original characters are not.
You'll have an easier time with this book if you have a familiarity with the dialect of the internet age (i.e. "basic bitch"). Even if you do, it's not an easy swallow (and no, that's not a porn pun). This book is a catalogue of depravity. Halfway through, I became a bit inured to it. And then, Wagner kept me guessing with some well-placed, inevitable-feeling plot developments. But it does what it means to do, I think. Fame is dark. You pay the price in order to achieve it or after you achieve it, and if you don't achieve it at all, you'll still end up screwed. Or worse.
There's so much tragedy here I might have drowned in it. Drugs, porn, felony, . But Wagner is good enough to put in a little bit of hope. And that's all it takes.
[Review copy received through a GoodReads First Reads giveaway]
But there's more to this book than intense, impressive stylistics. We get to know a constellation of characters through third person internal monologues, written as they would be in an email, a blog entry, a text. Possibly the most likeable character is the fictionalized Michael Douglas, whose measured, late-life voice is bitter sweet. The least-likeable is -- well, there's a multi-way tie for worst.
Every character is poisoned, to one extent or another, by fame. By having it, by wanting it, by being in proximity to it. Jerzy, a paparazzo eternally in search of underage "honeyshots" of car-exiting starlets for a particular collector. His pregnant teenage sister, Reeyonna, and her boyfriend Rikki, who believe that 15 minutes of fame is their birthright and the only possible solution to their problems. Reeyonna's mother, who once upon a time made her living exploiting her own child and finds herself pulled into a similar, irresistible eddy years later.
The indefatigable ten-year-old Telma gives us a glimpse into the cancer industrial complex. Bud Wiggins brings the glamorless workaday side of the entertainment business. Over all, the real-life famous people who appear in this book are treated more favourably than you'd expect and the original characters are not.
You'll have an easier time with this book if you have a familiarity with the dialect of the internet age (i.e. "basic bitch"). Even if you do, it's not an easy swallow (and no, that's not a porn pun). This book is a catalogue of depravity. Halfway through, I became a bit inured to it. And then, Wagner kept me guessing with some well-placed, inevitable-feeling plot developments. But it does what it means to do, I think. Fame is dark. You pay the price in order to achieve it or after you achieve it, and if you don't achieve it at all, you'll still end up screwed. Or worse.
There's so much tragedy here I might have drowned in it. Drugs, porn, felony, . But Wagner is good enough to put in a little bit of hope. And that's all it takes.
[Review copy received through a GoodReads First Reads giveaway]
August 10, 2012
**RECEIVED THROUGH GOODREADS GIVEAWAYS**
This is a generous 2 stars that was only redeemed due to the writing and form of the novel.
When people saw me reading this and asked what I thought, I said SMUT! I have never felt like such a prude as when I was reading this and feeling disgusted with the explicit scenes of teenage sex. Not what I would normally pick up to be entertained by.
There was a genius in the theme of today's reality tv and personal fame quest obsession as well as how the author wove internet-speak and pop culture references into the narrative. However, if you are not up to the minute on your E!Talk celebrities and rappers (something as a 25 year old I know nothing about i.e. who shot Tupac) large swaths of the book will be lost on you as the references become cumbersome. This also leads to concerns about how the book will achieve any longevity with the high turn over of pop culture. I feel that this may be a niche book for the Hollywood set or those that fill their time by trying to "Keep up with the Kardashians" among others.
While trying to make sense of the novel I looked up the author and read a quote where he says the novel is about "American culture which is now obsessed with fame to the point of absurdity". In his aim to demonstrate this, I applaud the author for constructing a controversial, critical look at ourselves. But the bottom line is: would I recommend this to someone? No.
This is a generous 2 stars that was only redeemed due to the writing and form of the novel.
When people saw me reading this and asked what I thought, I said SMUT! I have never felt like such a prude as when I was reading this and feeling disgusted with the explicit scenes of teenage sex. Not what I would normally pick up to be entertained by.
There was a genius in the theme of today's reality tv and personal fame quest obsession as well as how the author wove internet-speak and pop culture references into the narrative. However, if you are not up to the minute on your E!Talk celebrities and rappers (something as a 25 year old I know nothing about i.e. who shot Tupac) large swaths of the book will be lost on you as the references become cumbersome. This also leads to concerns about how the book will achieve any longevity with the high turn over of pop culture. I feel that this may be a niche book for the Hollywood set or those that fill their time by trying to "Keep up with the Kardashians" among others.
While trying to make sense of the novel I looked up the author and read a quote where he says the novel is about "American culture which is now obsessed with fame to the point of absurdity". In his aim to demonstrate this, I applaud the author for constructing a controversial, critical look at ourselves. But the bottom line is: would I recommend this to someone? No.
July 23, 2012
Got sent a free copy of this because that is how I roll (I guess). Read it in the span of a weekend. It's complex and fascinating and I'm still trying to suss out how I feel about it.
One of the least important parts, I think, is that I was mildly bothered by how totally wrong the stuff about the porn industry was (though a good deal of that only bothered me because I'm TOO INSIDERY, and doesn't it really matter if the book presents Montana Fishburne as still performing when everyone knows she made like, two movies and then freaked out and went to rehab? And don't get me started on Sasha Grey--though more disturbing was the book's cavalier presentation of the creation of underage porn, which SERIOUSLY GUYS DOES NOT HAPPEN). But suspending my disbelief and taking that bit as artistic license, well, I was compelled by the ultimately tragic tale of a group of people blindly obsessed with this sad idea of celebrity and success to the point of self destruction.
Anyway, I have to think more on it, but I thought it was worth a read.
One of the least important parts, I think, is that I was mildly bothered by how totally wrong the stuff about the porn industry was (though a good deal of that only bothered me because I'm TOO INSIDERY, and doesn't it really matter if the book presents Montana Fishburne as still performing when everyone knows she made like, two movies and then freaked out and went to rehab? And don't get me started on Sasha Grey--though more disturbing was the book's cavalier presentation of the creation of underage porn, which SERIOUSLY GUYS DOES NOT HAPPEN). But suspending my disbelief and taking that bit as artistic license, well, I was compelled by the ultimately tragic tale of a group of people blindly obsessed with this sad idea of celebrity and success to the point of self destruction.
Anyway, I have to think more on it, but I thought it was worth a read.
August 13, 2012
I am having a hard time reading this one as it is very heavy on the Pop references in music and reality TV also the idiotic spelling of "text slang" is hard to follow.
OMG! This book is like watching a train wreak, you know you should not stare but you do. The pop culture references were every where and if you are over 20 or not living with MTV and TMZ then most of them go right over your head. I found the book to be a like a roller coaster ride, fun a times but other times makes you want to be sick, almost like two different books mixed up and bound into one. Some of the writing is very good and other parts are just plain garbage. I am so glad the was a Goodreads win and not a book I purchased. Would I recommend this to anyone to read? NO. Now who do I give this to to get it off my bookshelf.
OMG! This book is like watching a train wreak, you know you should not stare but you do. The pop culture references were every where and if you are over 20 or not living with MTV and TMZ then most of them go right over your head. I found the book to be a like a roller coaster ride, fun a times but other times makes you want to be sick, almost like two different books mixed up and bound into one. Some of the writing is very good and other parts are just plain garbage. I am so glad the was a Goodreads win and not a book I purchased. Would I recommend this to anyone to read? NO. Now who do I give this to to get it off my bookshelf.
August 9, 2012
(I received an advanced copy of this book as part of the firstreads giveaway program.)
This is a disturbing novel about people obsessed with fame. I give it three stars, because even though I was at times (okay, most of the time) horrified and completely unable to relate to these bizarre characters, in the end, miraculously, I did feel like the author had made them real for me. I have to acknowledge that this is good writing (even though the writing style is as bizarre as the characters). There is some serious wordsmithery going on.
If you are going to read this novel though, you need to read it soon, because the the text and story are extremely heavy on pop-culture references. There's probably an average of twenty name-drops per page. Makes me wonder how such an of-this-moment novel will read in a couple of years.
This is a disturbing novel about people obsessed with fame. I give it three stars, because even though I was at times (okay, most of the time) horrified and completely unable to relate to these bizarre characters, in the end, miraculously, I did feel like the author had made them real for me. I have to acknowledge that this is good writing (even though the writing style is as bizarre as the characters). There is some serious wordsmithery going on.
If you are going to read this novel though, you need to read it soon, because the the text and story are extremely heavy on pop-culture references. There's probably an average of twenty name-drops per page. Makes me wonder how such an of-this-moment novel will read in a couple of years.
February 26, 2014
this was probably the most unusual book I've ever read. Probably the most obscene, perverted, profane thing Ive ever read, too. I woud not recommend it for the faint of heart. I cant imagine most people I know reading it all the way through it's just that shocking at points. But it's also one of the funniest books Ive ever read and definitely one of the most original. I want to read more of this author's work, but I hope the next one I try isn't as explicit..some of the porn-related plot really pushed my limits...I almost didnt get past the first section but Im glad I did...I love the author's cynical viewpoint
June 2, 2013
This is a bizarre book. I'm really torn between three and four stars so I'll go with three since it *definitely* isn't for everyone. In fact, for the first few chapters I was ready to put it down but also oddly compelled to keep reading.
It's rather Bret Easton Ellis-ishy in its name dropping, wild thought having, random subject bouncing way. If you like that sort of thing, you'll love it. If you don't, run away.
It's profane in places while profound in others. Another reviewer said "It's like an Oreo with a sour cream center" and I think that sums it up.
It's rather Bret Easton Ellis-ishy in its name dropping, wild thought having, random subject bouncing way. If you like that sort of thing, you'll love it. If you don't, run away.
It's profane in places while profound in others. Another reviewer said "It's like an Oreo with a sour cream center" and I think that sums it up.
August 9, 2012
I won a copy of this book through FirstReads.
I'll admit, I found it tough to get through the book at times. I'm a bit conservative, so I found the graphic pornography to be a bit much for me. What kept me reading to the end was the rapid-fire stream of ideas, as well as an interest in the various characters.
I'll admit, I found it tough to get through the book at times. I'm a bit conservative, so I found the graphic pornography to be a bit much for me. What kept me reading to the end was the rapid-fire stream of ideas, as well as an interest in the various characters.
October 4, 2012
This is the Internet/pop culture wrote a book, this would be it. It was stomach churning & amazing. I was equally disgusted, yet curious. I couldn't stop reading it.This exactly what pop culture in 2012 is.
September 19, 2012
An over-long examination of contemporary American celebrity-based culture. At times razor sharp and laugh-out-loud funny, the characters, situations, and writing are not compelling or interesting enough to sustain the 600+ pages. Could have been more effective at half the length.
August 10, 2012
Brilliant critique of celebrity and youth-obsessed culture, without being moralistic or boring...and one of the funniest novels I've ever read.
Read
June 29, 2015This novel is all over the place, but it all comes down to this: Fame. More of it. Lack of it. Slipping of it. More superficial inner-character diatribes I have never read, yet sadly, the writing is truth. The characters started out as funny absurd to me because they were so real and ridiculous – laugh out loud funny – but by the end of the book, I was ready to strangle them all. The world of tweets and that people actually care about tweets has near ruined several generations. Unequivocally, these characters are screwed up. There is no redeeming social value. There are some touching paragraphs especially towards the end, but the pot roast is still the pot roast. This novel is a horror story, but as real as a 20/20 interview. Both the interior and relational conversations are as superficial and vacuous as the din of the mall food court, but brilliantly written. As I went deeper into this book I wondered what I had done wrong in my life: I felt I had lived poorly, died, and found myself in purgatory inside the mind of a “Teen Beat” reader. It made my head implode and as I read, I felt myself consciously blinking trying to process. When Kancer is cool because you spell it with a K (instead of a C) and can tweet it for ratings, you know there is something amiss in the shallow world of starlets and their followers. It was like reading a year’s supply of “Star,” “Us,” and “People” magazine all in one sitting. When I reached the last page, I wanted to get up and take a shower.
What’s in here? Let’s see… Superficial, jealous, lying parental relationships. Hollywood namedropping. Teens who don’t know how to write complete sentences become parents and are so excited that the news calls for a celebration of 4 or 5 Percs and “let’s f—” and see if we can poke the baby in the eyeball. A wannabe screenwriter living with his mother waiting for her to die. A 12-year-old Hollywood kid with more money that Chase trying to track his deserting mother down online. A famous actor dreaming of a comeback. The wife of a famous actor who is a famous prima donna because of the famous actor. The daughter of a well-respected famous actor who sees her career in porn as a future to the legitimate world. A pregnant teen famous for scandalous nude photos when she was a baby who leaves her has-been-famous-and-wants-to-be-famous-again-Sears-portraiture mother and runs off with her loser porn-addicted boyfriend where they both live with an “American Idol” contestant disqualified for making up a fake sob-story-past. These are joined by the pregnant teen’s brother who is famous for taking pictures of famous women getting out of cars without panties and selling them to websites. An obsession with “Glee.” Internet access to the absurd. Porn websites. The public’s obsession with celebrity skin and other inanities of fame. It sounds absurd, but it is a pop culture, tabloid, no-attention-span-immediate-gratification, angry harangue crash course. It’s the GIGO demographic: garbage in garbage out. Bruce Wagner has put a lot of work into this. And fun. There’s no way he could write some of the lines and not be sitting there laughing out loud. But I can feel the sweat.
It is satire at its finest, but the kind of satire that simply holds up the mirror to this population and let’s them hang themselves. There is nothing moralistic, preachy, high handed, or manipulative about how Wagner does this. The guy is just writing it as he sees it. Wagner hits the characters dead center. The stream-of-consciousness inside these characters’ minds is straight out of any supermarket tabloid. It is rapid-fire. The voices are right-on and distinct, which is a major accomplishment considering they are from the same morphic sub-culture. Wagner’s strength is in writing the stream-of-consciousness, MTV-five-second attention span associated so much with this crowd, and turning that prose into independent voices and full dysfunctional families. This is a long book, possibly too long. However, as I read it, the character interactions move along quickly. It is when we are inside a particular character’s head that things tend to circle around on itself. Therein is the conflict between economy and realism. The road taken produces a more pointed effect. Circle, circle, but never arrive. It reminds me when Homer Simpson had a thought. Wait. Wait. “Peanuts.”
I can’t see this novel playing well in middle-America, but it is important because of its characterizations and I will speak from experience, once you get this story and these characters in your mind, there is absolutely no way to get them out. No amount of Lysol will do it. It is reflective of our country’s obsession with fame to the point of absurdity. It will make you laugh. It will make you angry. It will make you want to pistol whip somebody.
Language and subject matter probably won’t appeal to many of the readers on this list. For those whose sensitivities are easily blasted, this is porn taking a look at porn. “Fifty Shades of Grey” might want to pass itself off as a pig in a suit, but this is what it is. There is no preamble. Right from the get-go we are f—ing.
What is wrong with this book is that everything is right. There are too many people in the world like this. He’s not making fun of Hollywood. He’s not making fun of the tabloid newsstand. No, he’s making fun of what America has become. Facebook, text, and tweet that, twit. It’s partly the vanity and vacuousness of Beverly Hills, but even more so, it is a mirror image of the culture that worships them.
How close to reality is it? My son was selling magazines this week for his school. There was a 1 page offering for science and history. They’ve discontinued the literature section except for certain literary magazines which are nothing more than hi-brow navel-gazing. There were several pages for sports (essentially J-Lo in the body of PacMan Jones). And the rest of the 40-50 page catalog was basically glamour and star-chasing with cleavage and “secret tips” galore. This is for an elementary magazine sale fundraiser. But we all know that if my son went door-to-door with a one-sheet of intellectual fare, he would sell nothing. The point of Wagner’s novel is well-made and, unfortunately for those who seek a more erudite world, you’re not helping. No matter what we like to think of as traditional values, the question comes down to this: Will doing a sex tape or posing nude make us famous when we have no other talent or redeeming value to offer? And if we are not doing the tape or posing, will we be enablers by looking or talking about it to our friends? Do we talk about the personal lives of stars as though we know them? Therein is the rub of this book because in this culture, there really is only one answer.
From Amazon:
“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.”
Dead Stars on Killer Nashville
My Other Reviews on Killer Nashville
What’s in here? Let’s see… Superficial, jealous, lying parental relationships. Hollywood namedropping. Teens who don’t know how to write complete sentences become parents and are so excited that the news calls for a celebration of 4 or 5 Percs and “let’s f—” and see if we can poke the baby in the eyeball. A wannabe screenwriter living with his mother waiting for her to die. A 12-year-old Hollywood kid with more money that Chase trying to track his deserting mother down online. A famous actor dreaming of a comeback. The wife of a famous actor who is a famous prima donna because of the famous actor. The daughter of a well-respected famous actor who sees her career in porn as a future to the legitimate world. A pregnant teen famous for scandalous nude photos when she was a baby who leaves her has-been-famous-and-wants-to-be-famous-again-Sears-portraiture mother and runs off with her loser porn-addicted boyfriend where they both live with an “American Idol” contestant disqualified for making up a fake sob-story-past. These are joined by the pregnant teen’s brother who is famous for taking pictures of famous women getting out of cars without panties and selling them to websites. An obsession with “Glee.” Internet access to the absurd. Porn websites. The public’s obsession with celebrity skin and other inanities of fame. It sounds absurd, but it is a pop culture, tabloid, no-attention-span-immediate-gratification, angry harangue crash course. It’s the GIGO demographic: garbage in garbage out. Bruce Wagner has put a lot of work into this. And fun. There’s no way he could write some of the lines and not be sitting there laughing out loud. But I can feel the sweat.
It is satire at its finest, but the kind of satire that simply holds up the mirror to this population and let’s them hang themselves. There is nothing moralistic, preachy, high handed, or manipulative about how Wagner does this. The guy is just writing it as he sees it. Wagner hits the characters dead center. The stream-of-consciousness inside these characters’ minds is straight out of any supermarket tabloid. It is rapid-fire. The voices are right-on and distinct, which is a major accomplishment considering they are from the same morphic sub-culture. Wagner’s strength is in writing the stream-of-consciousness, MTV-five-second attention span associated so much with this crowd, and turning that prose into independent voices and full dysfunctional families. This is a long book, possibly too long. However, as I read it, the character interactions move along quickly. It is when we are inside a particular character’s head that things tend to circle around on itself. Therein is the conflict between economy and realism. The road taken produces a more pointed effect. Circle, circle, but never arrive. It reminds me when Homer Simpson had a thought. Wait. Wait. “Peanuts.”
I can’t see this novel playing well in middle-America, but it is important because of its characterizations and I will speak from experience, once you get this story and these characters in your mind, there is absolutely no way to get them out. No amount of Lysol will do it. It is reflective of our country’s obsession with fame to the point of absurdity. It will make you laugh. It will make you angry. It will make you want to pistol whip somebody.
Language and subject matter probably won’t appeal to many of the readers on this list. For those whose sensitivities are easily blasted, this is porn taking a look at porn. “Fifty Shades of Grey” might want to pass itself off as a pig in a suit, but this is what it is. There is no preamble. Right from the get-go we are f—ing.
What is wrong with this book is that everything is right. There are too many people in the world like this. He’s not making fun of Hollywood. He’s not making fun of the tabloid newsstand. No, he’s making fun of what America has become. Facebook, text, and tweet that, twit. It’s partly the vanity and vacuousness of Beverly Hills, but even more so, it is a mirror image of the culture that worships them.
How close to reality is it? My son was selling magazines this week for his school. There was a 1 page offering for science and history. They’ve discontinued the literature section except for certain literary magazines which are nothing more than hi-brow navel-gazing. There were several pages for sports (essentially J-Lo in the body of PacMan Jones). And the rest of the 40-50 page catalog was basically glamour and star-chasing with cleavage and “secret tips” galore. This is for an elementary magazine sale fundraiser. But we all know that if my son went door-to-door with a one-sheet of intellectual fare, he would sell nothing. The point of Wagner’s novel is well-made and, unfortunately for those who seek a more erudite world, you’re not helping. No matter what we like to think of as traditional values, the question comes down to this: Will doing a sex tape or posing nude make us famous when we have no other talent or redeeming value to offer? And if we are not doing the tape or posing, will we be enablers by looking or talking about it to our friends? Do we talk about the personal lives of stars as though we know them? Therein is the rub of this book because in this culture, there really is only one answer.
From Amazon:
“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.”
Dead Stars on Killer Nashville
My Other Reviews on Killer Nashville
September 9, 2025
holy shit. so disgusting and so beautiful. quintessentially american.
when you finish the book and the "_'s moving on" on the inner cover take on a totally different meaning
last year i lost my aunt mattie who was obsessed with celebrities and prided herself on it. i'm tutoring this woman who's convinced she's going to have a big break as an actress/influencer. over a decade later this book still speaks to the soul of the world; the 2013y references in it (kreayshawn, perez hilton, the newness of the internet seconds before it was a villain that was part of life) make me nostalgic and make me critical of my nostalgia but really everybody wants to be somebody.
wagner knows youre rooting for jacquie and gives her everything but destroys everyone causing her pain in the process.
obsession with celebrity = obsession with death
when you finish the book and the "_'s moving on" on the inner cover take on a totally different meaning
last year i lost my aunt mattie who was obsessed with celebrities and prided herself on it. i'm tutoring this woman who's convinced she's going to have a big break as an actress/influencer. over a decade later this book still speaks to the soul of the world; the 2013y references in it (kreayshawn, perez hilton, the newness of the internet seconds before it was a villain that was part of life) make me nostalgic and make me critical of my nostalgia but really everybody wants to be somebody.
wagner knows youre rooting for jacquie and gives her everything but destroys everyone causing her pain in the process.
obsession with celebrity = obsession with death
April 18, 2018
Please never ask me how I managed to get through this; I myself will never know. The second star is because of the, frankly, inspired bits of wordplay and also because towards the end-ish comes a moment of such bitter and twisted poetry that it stuns in its sheer audacity.
But I am curious about how they made this one into a film (there's a ridiculous irony to that, too).
But I am curious about how they made this one into a film (there's a ridiculous irony to that, too).
January 28, 2018
This book holds a special, personal record for me: it’s the first book I’ve ever returned to a bookstore. I couldn’t make it past the first three chapters. Maybe it gets better from there, but I didn’t feel like wasting the time to find out.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews