Still Holding

'Imagine Dickens without London, Dostoevsky without St. Petersburg. It's like that for Bruce Wagner and Hollywood' (Los Angeles Times Book Review). A twenty-first-century Nathanael West with a gift for Swiftian satire, Bruce Wagner is on familiar territory and at the height of his powers in this brilliant, scathing novel of a Hollywood adrift in unchecked ambition and unbridled excess. In 'blazing, high-speed prose' (Salman Rushdie), Wagner presides over a tangled collection of stars, celebrity wannabes and sociopaths. Among the players and the played are Kit Lightfoot, the superstar actor, sex symbol and practicing Buddhist whose charmed life is thrown into disarray by a disgruntled fan; and Becca, a struggling young actress and Drew Barrymore lookalike whose first big break is playing a corpse on Six Feet Under. Excoriating the twenty-four hour feeding frenzy of self-promotion, self-improvement, and celebrity worship, STILL HOLDING is at once heartfelt and hilarious, shrewd and complex, savage and sensational.

Bruce 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.