Force Majeure

Bruce Wagner has written twelve novels and bestsellers, including the famous “Cellphone Trilogy,” I’m Losing You (PEN USA finalist), I’ll Let You Go and Still Holding), Dead Stars, The Empty Chair, and the PEN/Faulkner-finalist 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 Bruce Wagner’s Force Majeure  “Bruce Wagner’s stories about Hollywood—and about many other places—are the best I’ve read since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West; in short, the greatest.”— Terry Southern  “Quite simply a masterpiece.”— Janet Coleman, The Bloomsbury Review  “Wagner takes this genre to its most extreme literary outpost yet—and the competition’s been pretty healthy. . . . Much like Tom Wolfe, Wagner has an unerring gift for pitch—perfect character nuances and authentic contemporary dialogue.”— Charles Paikert, The Nation  “Wagner gleefully rips out the livid, still-beating heart of Hollywood to expose its class system, its built-in vulgarity, its shrinks, AA meetings, starlets, harlots, climbers, and burnouts. Wagner is a hip sociologist of ferocious veracity and methodical precision.”— Publishers Weekly  “Force Majeure will delight movie buffs. . . . a cynical Hollywood scribe tickles and tests the system from within.”— David Finkle, The New York Times Book Review  “Great fun and singularly well-written.”— David Walton, The Philadelphia Enquirer  “A writer without mercy. This book is like a wire stretched across the throat.”— Oliver Stone  “Wagner has a feverish brain and a cool eye for the social distinctions that rule the film industry.”— The Wall Street Journal  “If Jackie Collins were seduced by Dostoevsky on the floor of the William Morris mailroom, the literary offspring might read something like Force Majeure.”— Carrie Fisher  “This is no modest triumph. . . . Bud Wiggins may well rise to the status we give treasured cultural figures, like Tom Joad or Randall McMurphy. . . . His birth in this first novel is stamped in our memories for years to come.”— Donald Newlove, The Hollywood Reporter  “A prose symphony of surreal episodes . . . an epic black comedy that explodes the limits of the genre once and for all. Wagner pulls out all the stops, diving into Hollywood with the kind of hyperbolic intelligence novelists once lavished on sex and the Second World War . . . one of the best Hollywood novels since Day of the Locust.”— Christopher Walters, Movieline  “A work of flat-out fucking genius.”— Terry GilliamPraise for Bruce Wagner"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"Wagner writes like a wizard. His prose writhes and coruscates."—John Updike