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Sep 23, 2025
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
AMPUTATION is the first novel to be written about the inferno that obliterated two Los Angeles cities in January of 2025. Major characters are comedian Stephen Colbert; Karen Bass; a Timothée Chalamet stunt double; a fiercely pro-Palestinian heiress and her Zionist father; disgraced Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch and a failed indie film producer——along with an assorted battalion of ordinary people, opportunists, and looters.
A fable drenched in hyperrealism, AMPUTATION is a burnt jewel box showcasing Wagner's transcendent, scabrously poetic powers as he explores the lives (and deaths) of the fire victims, and the consequences of dereliction, delusion, incompetence——and impermanence.
A fable drenched in hyperrealism, AMPUTATION is a burnt jewel box showcasing Wagner's transcendent, scabrously poetic powers as he explores the lives (and deaths) of the fire victims, and the consequences of dereliction, delusion, incompetence——and impermanence.
Product Details
| Publisher | Arcade |
| Publish Date | September 23, 2025 |
| Pages | 200 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781648211614 |
| Dimensions | 203.2 X 139.7 X 0.0 mm | 313.9 g |
BISAC Categories: Literary Fiction, Humor & Entertainment
About the Author
Bruce Wagner has written twelve novels and bestsellers, including the famous “Cellphone Trilogy,” (I’m Losing You, I’ll Let You Go and Still Holding), Dead Stars, The Empty Chair, and the PEN/Faulkner-nominated 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 the acclaimed Tracey Ullman’sState of the Union. He has written essays and articles for the New York Times, Artforum and the New Yorker.
Reviews
PRAISE FOR AMPUTATION
“Astonishing—scorching, ruthless, and finally mournful, Amputation is a supreme achievement.”—TODD SOLONDZ
"Bruce Wagner is a mad genius and an American master. There are few writers, living or dead, who can make a reader laugh and cry on the same page. In AMPUTATION, Wagner proves once more he is one of the great chroniclers of this surreal, demented age." —ROSS BARKAN, author of Glass Century
“Wagner’s recent brush with cancellation has won him a new publisher, a new audience, and a new place in the American literary firmament. His time has never left . . . and has come at last.”—JOHN PISTELLI, The Metropolitan Review
PRAISE FOR BRUCE WAGNER
“Wagner the doctor/novelist addresses his patients in an austere and loving tone. He grants haunted forgiveness. He is fully aware of the cost of spiritual hunger in the face of fame and all its temptations. He castigates, comforts and reprimands in equal doses and offers us novels of tenderness and grandeur.”—James Ellroy
"He is a visionary posing as a farceur."—Salman Rushdie
“If it was the promise of laughter that first drew me to Wagner’s work, it is his language that has kept me hooked… Marveling at his comic and linguistic gifts, at his sheer storytelling verve – his ability to handle large ensembles of characters and keep numerous narrative balls in the air while at the same time shooting flames from his mouth and balancing a naked lady on his nose – I nevertheless introduce Wagner’s work to my writing students with a caution: Don’t try this at home.” —Sigrid Nunez
"Bruce Wagner is Hollywood’s master of satire."—Sam Wasson, author of The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
"Wagner is the James Joyce whose Dublin is Hollywood."—David Cronenberg
"Bruce Wagner writes really wonderfully about that whole milieu [of Hollywood] and its gothic vanity."—Emma Cline
“I’m a big Bruce Wagner fan.”—Father John Misty
"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
“Astonishing—scorching, ruthless, and finally mournful, Amputation is a supreme achievement.”—TODD SOLONDZ
"Bruce Wagner is a mad genius and an American master. There are few writers, living or dead, who can make a reader laugh and cry on the same page. In AMPUTATION, Wagner proves once more he is one of the great chroniclers of this surreal, demented age." —ROSS BARKAN, author of Glass Century
“Wagner’s recent brush with cancellation has won him a new publisher, a new audience, and a new place in the American literary firmament. His time has never left . . . and has come at last.”—JOHN PISTELLI, The Metropolitan Review
PRAISE FOR BRUCE WAGNER
“Wagner the doctor/novelist addresses his patients in an austere and loving tone. He grants haunted forgiveness. He is fully aware of the cost of spiritual hunger in the face of fame and all its temptations. He castigates, comforts and reprimands in equal doses and offers us novels of tenderness and grandeur.”—James Ellroy
"He is a visionary posing as a farceur."—Salman Rushdie
“If it was the promise of laughter that first drew me to Wagner’s work, it is his language that has kept me hooked… Marveling at his comic and linguistic gifts, at his sheer storytelling verve – his ability to handle large ensembles of characters and keep numerous narrative balls in the air while at the same time shooting flames from his mouth and balancing a naked lady on his nose – I nevertheless introduce Wagner’s work to my writing students with a caution: Don’t try this at home.” —Sigrid Nunez
"Bruce Wagner is Hollywood’s master of satire."—Sam Wasson, author of The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
"Wagner is the James Joyce whose Dublin is Hollywood."—David Cronenberg
"Bruce Wagner writes really wonderfully about that whole milieu [of Hollywood] and its gothic vanity."—Emma Cline
“I’m a big Bruce Wagner fan.”—Father John Misty
"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
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