Still Holding

In "blazing, high-speed prose" (Salman Rushdie), Wagner presides over a tangled collection of stars, celebrity wannabes, and sociopaths as he offers a scathing novel of a Hollywood adrift in unchecked ambition and unbridled excess.

Bruce Wagner has been hailed for his powerful prose, his Swiftian satire, and the scalpel-sharp wit that has, in each of his novels, dissected and sometimes disemboweled Hollywood excess.

In his most ambitious book to date, "Still Holding," Wagner immerses readers in post-September 11 Hollywood, revealing as much rabid ambition, rampant narcissism, and unchecked mental illness as ever. He infiltrates the gilded life of a superstar actor/sex symbol/practicing Buddhist, the compromised world of a young actress whose big break comes when she's hired to play a corpse on "Six Feet Under," and the strange parallel universe of look-alikes -- an entire industry in which struggling actors are hired out for parties and conventions to play their famous counterparts. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, ferocious and empathetic, "Still Holding" is Bruce Wagner's most expertly calibrated work.