“Virtuosic . . . [attests] not only to Mr. Wagner’s range as a writer—his ability to write with affecting sincerity as well as satiric glee—but also to his power as a storyteller to beguile.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, on I’ll Let You Go

"[He] takes great pains to endow his...creations with detailed and vivid inner lives, in which even the shallowest circumstances are transformed into high-stakes questions of spiritual life and death." -- Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World, on Memorial

“The author's achievement is that almost every character is fascinating, no matter how hideous.... I'm Losing You may stop short of brilliance, but it's pretty fabulous and its message is trenchant.” – Anita Gates, The New York Times Book Review, on I’m Losing You

"A writer without mercy . . . this book is like a wire stretched across the throat."-- Oliver Stone on I’m Losing You

“Wagner crafts a savage meditation on contemporary self-involvement—his characters are vacuous, name-dropping black holes of self-absorption. The writing itself is wonderfully bad, as Bertie the hapless hack attempts to chronicle his melodramatic tale with 25-cent words ("commodious," "numinous," etc.) and wickedly overwrought metaphors … It's a short, sharp book that puts a dagger right in the heart of Hollywood.” Publisher’s Weekly on The Chrysanthemum Palace

"The Chrysanthemum Palace is full of daring language that veers between being wickedly funny and just plain wicked. Nobody writes more knowingly about Hollywood than Wagner....Like Thad, its most magnetic character, Chrysanthemum Palace is 'raw and cultured, cultivated and kitschy' and great fun."

"A smashing debut novel...this is superb stuff -- the best yet about Hollywood's humiliated lower orders as they grasp at recovery programs or head for high-priced mental farms. [A] richly done boffo winner."

-- Kirkus Reviews on Force Majeure

“What Wagner does, nobody does better. He is the Nathanael West, the Budd Schulberg of our time, the go-to guy for closely observed novels about a sun-soaked hellhole that may or may not be a real place.” The Washington Post on Still Holding

"Bruce Wagner is a moralist whose misfortune it is to have as his subject the self-crazed, affect free, excess-addicted world capital of amorality, Hollywood. His hard luck is our good fortune. In blazing, high-speed prose he tears into his subject with a taboo-breaking savage rage disguised as wild comedy. He is a visionary posing as a farceur." Salman Rushdie on Still Holding