Staff Pick

With the introduction of the drug-addicted screenwriter Bud Wiggins, Bruce Wagner’s first novel, Force Majeure, was instantly compared to Nathanael West’s nihilistic Day of the Locust. In its companion book, Staff Pick follows the darkly merciless, hallucinatory adventures of the father‘s progeny—Bud Wiggins Junior. An aging, forgotten novelist who finds himself figuratively and literally on the cusp of being out of print, Junior shadow-boxes with a sadistic, celebrated, long-dead father while becoming a shadow himself.

As he moves through the broken landscape of contemporary Los Angeles, Junior goes to imaginary war with famous literary adversaries, navigates everyday treacheries, is beset by old lovers gone mad, and ambushed by the vagaries of family: a surprise half-sister and a mother in a memory home who’s being malevolently seduced by an AI avatar.

With scabrous tenderness, high and low comedy, and his characteristic saturation of spirituality, Wagner’s Staff Pick is a sacred symphony of loserdom—a “failed surgery” that becomes an unforgettable portrait of the artist as a quixotic old man.

“He is a visionary posing as a farceur.” —Salman Rushdie