Synopses & Reviews
First published in 1991, Bruce Wagner's debut,
Force Majeure, is now widely acknowledged as a classic of Hollywood "confessional" literature a major achievement by a writer who stands shoulder to shoulder with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West.
Bud Wiggins dreamed of achieving fame as a screenwriter. He almost made it. Instead, he finds himself free-falling through a world of hallucinatory absurdity, low comedy, and epic degradation. A Hollywood bottom-feeder who moonlights as a limo driver to pay the bills, both tormented and vicariously aroused by his contact with the industry's elite, Mr. Wiggins bears poignant, paranoid witness to the horror and hysteria that are by-products of "the Business." His phantasmagoric saga, by turns picaresque, pornographic, and poetic, Force Majeure is the first of a projected quartet called "Scriptures" that will chronicle the misadventures and transcendental fall and rise comic, tragic, and tragicosmic of Bud Wiggins, Quixote of Babylon.
Review
"Smashing debut....[T]his is superb stuff the best yet about Hollywood's humiliated lower orders....Bud is magnificently memorable....Richly done boffo winner." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"[W]ickedly sardonic, literate, frequently hilarious....Wagner gleefully rips out the livid, still-beating heart of Hollywood....Wagner is a hip sociologist of ferocious veracity and methodical precision." Publishers Weekly
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"Wagner is a gifted writer with a canny sensibility loosed among the palms....Unerringly Wagner details the nightmarish triple-think and paranoid
symbology of every Hollywood transaction." The Washington Post
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"One of the most memorable recent novels of any kind....I'd even go so far as to say that Wagner surpasses...F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby Stories, which until now was for me (along with Nathanael West's Day of the Locust), the ultimate Hollywood fiction." Ron Rosenbaum, New York Observer
Review
"Hollywood as setting for satire or black comedy gets tiresome, and despite some nice one-liners and bits here, few beyond film buffs or those in The Business will go the distance with Bud Wiggins." Library Journal
Review
"As knowing a novel of late-twentieth-century Hollywood as one is likely to encounter, brilliantly detailed and remorselessly funny. Mr. Wagner is a major talent." William Gibson
Review
"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
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"Quite simply a masterpiece." The Bloomsbury Review
Review
"Wagner takes this genre to its most extreme literary outpost yet....Much like Tom Wolfe, Wagner has an unerring gift for pitch-perfect character nuances and authentic contemporary dialogue." The Nation
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"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
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"Great fun and singularly well-written." The Philadelphia Inquirer
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"A work of flat-out fucking genius." Terry Gilliam
Synopsis
Newly reissued the wildly acclaimed debut novel by the author of The Chrysanthemum Palace. This powerful black comedy stars parasitic screenwriter Bud Wiggins and delivers readers to contemporary Hollywood's surreal fringes.
Synopsis
Bud Wiggins dreamed of achieving fame as a screenwriter. He almost made it. Instead, he finds himself free-falling through a world of hallucinatory absurdity, low comedy, and epic degradation. A Hollywood bottom-feeder who moonlights as a limo driver to pay the bills, both tormented and vicariously aroused by his contact with the industry's elite, Mr. Wiggins bears poignant, paranoid witness to the horror and hysteria that are by-products of the Business. His phantasmagoric saga, by turns picaresque, pornographic, and poetic, Force Majeure is the first of a projected quartet called Scriptures that will chronicle the misadventures and transcendental fall and rise -- comic, tragic, and tragicosmic -- of Bud Wiggins, Quixote of Babylon.
About the Author
Bruce Wagner is the author of Force Majeure; I'm Losing You; I'll Let You Go, which was nominated for the PEN USA fiction award; Still Holding; and most recently, The Chrysanthemum Palace.