Marvel Universe - by Bruce Wagner (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Marvel Universe details the lives and deaths of Wagner's cast of characters: an orphaned billionairess, a black man wrongly convicted of murder, a schizophrenic child obsessed with the comic book character Wolverine, a cancelled TV star, and the love child of Elon Musk. Their intertwining stories take place during the pandemic, a year of tectonic social unrest, ushering in a new reality that surpasses anything any Hollywood franchise could hope to imagine.

Review Quotes

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

"[Wagner's The Empty Chair] would make a fine fictional companion to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton's writings on spiritual outrage and the impossibility of solace." --Dani Shapiro, The New York Time Book Review

"Bruce Wagner writes really wonderfully about that whole milieu [of Hollywood] and its gothic vanity."--Emma Cline

"To say that [Maps to the Stars] deglamorizes the movie business is like saying that Upton Sinclair deglamorized the meat-packing industry... the medium of film allows Wagner to make his audience visualize (instead of merely imagine) the hallucinations that plague his characters." --Francine Prose

"Wagner is the James Joyce whose Dublin is Hollywood."--David Cronenberg

"[Dead Stars is] A Rabelaisian masterpiece." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Bruce Wagner's stories about Hollywood are the best I've read since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West."--Terry Southern

"Wagner writes like a wizard. His prose writhes and coruscates."--John Updike

About the Author

Bruce Wagner has written thirteen 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, ROAR: American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr, 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 of the acclaimed Tracey Ullman's State of the Union. He has written essays and articles for the New York Times, Artforum and the New Yorker. He lives in Los Angeles.