by Bruce Wagner
First published 1996
The phone calls keep coming, but the connections keep breaking. In Hollywood, where everyone knows everyone and nobody knows anything, lives crash together in ways that feel both random and inevitable. A studio executive loses his grip on more than just his latest project. A fading star discovers that fame offers no protection from life's cruelest reversals. An aspiring actor learns that dreams can turn toxic faster than the city's air. Wagner pulls his characters through a maze of intersecting stories where the wealthy and the desperate share the same fundamental hungers. Each coincidence reveals another layer of the entertainment industry's particular brand of savagery. The city that manufactures fantasies becomes the backdrop for very real disasters. These people chase success, love, and meaning with equal desperation, but Hollywood has its own rules about who gets what they want.
Genres: fiction, drama, literary-fiction, contemporary
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: intersecting-storylines, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Hollywood
Period: 21st-century
319 pages · Hardcover · Villard
Content warnings: depression, mental-illness