Dead Stars
A Novel
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2.9 • 10 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“Dead Stars is the London Fields of Los Angeles, the Ulysses of TMZ culture—an immensely literate, fearsomely interior novel about people who are neither.”—Tom Bissell, GQ
At age thirteen, Telma is famous as the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor until threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old who’s just undergone a mastectomy…. Reeyonna believes that auditioning for pregnant teenage porn will help fulfill her dream of befriending Kanye West…. Jackie, a photographer once celebrated for arty nudes of her young daughter, is working at a Sears Family Portrait boutique…. And Oscar-winning Michael Douglas searches for meaning while his wife, Catherine, guest-stars on Glee.
Moving forward with the inexorable force of a tsunami, Dead Stars is Bruce Wagner’s 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Wagner's latest "entertainment" (after Memorial), aging, struggling screenwriter Bud Wiggins (from Wagner's debut, Force Majeure) is tapped to script a film for 12-year-old Biggie Brainard, the damaged brain behind booming Ooh Baby Baby productions. Biggie yearns for his mother and tracks her online as she spelunks the caves of the world. Bud lives with his mother, Dolly, and longs for the day she dies. Their chapters are braided with that of other Hollywood stars and black holes: Michael Douglas dreams of remaking All That Jazz, with a few major changes. Reeyonna, a pregnant teen, runs away from her mother, Jacquie (a Sally Mann-like artist-cum-Sears-Portrait-Studio photographer), with her "pharaoh-looking" boyfriend, Rikki a foster kid, aspiring actor, and porn addict to live with female American Idol reject, drug dealer, and sex fiend Tom-Tom, who's squatting in Betty White's house with Reeyonna's half-brother Jerzy, "the first snatcherazzo" to get a photo of Dakota Fanning stepping out of a vehicle, sans panties. Jerzy's addiction to "bootie bumpin" (meth and water applied anally) fuels a diabolical word-play and deepening delusion that Eminem is slowly enslaving the world. Written in hyper-hilarious, brilliant prose, the book renders an obsessive pop-culture nightmare of surprising realism and light, illuminating the meanest corners of its characters' and our culture's desperation.
