Mars Review of Books Podcast · Mars Review of Books

A World of Illusions w/ Bruce Wagner

·1 hr 19 min·5 clips

“There was no water in the reservoir” becomes a charge about LA fire response and empty preparedness.

The opening does not bother with politeness. Bruce says the fires hit him tremendously, then turns a casual check-in about LA into an angry case against the response around the Palisades. He gives the kind of details that keep the fury from floating off: an empty reservoir, repairs, a damaged cover, Santa Ana winds, low humidity, and no fire trucks stationed for what was coming. The mood stays dry, clipped, and accusatory. Then the episode cuts over to the older stuff that made him a writer. Books show up less like schoolwork than objects with a charge. He wanted his own book beside the stolen ones, even though he admits he had not read every book he worshiped. The French arrive early in the story. Lautreamont, Jean-Paul Genet, and Radiguet sit inside a private boyhood canon, funny and grandiose without getting cleaned up. Writing still feels impossible at first. A novel is too high a climb, and even a short story feels beyond reach until Kafka's prose poems give him a smaller door. That form lets him write something compressed, story-adjacent, and poetic under pressure without pretending he was born a poet. Then comes imitation, which sounds less embarrassing here than necessary. Bret Hart, Poe, and Ray Bradbury move through the conversation as writers he copied while figuring out what writing was. Screenwriting barges in before the literary ascent can get too tidy. At 25, Bruce says he fell into it, found success across a three-or-four-year span, and wrote a number of screenplays. Hollywood gets the bleak punchline: one film was made and never released because, in Bruce's telling, the director had substance issues. The end lands back on craft. The host hears a balance in Bruce's work, gentle but acerbic, and the episode leaves the listener with book talk instead of a neat little thesis.

As heard by us

A loose literary conversation that moves from LA fires and neglect to books, Kafka, and screenwriting.

The piece turns a conversation about the LA fires into something more literary than a routine author interview. It dwells on neglect and incompetence, the empty Palisades reservoir, and the lack of water and fire trucks in readiness, then moves into childhood book fetishism,…

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Press play if you want art talk with teeth and a little smoke in the room.

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