At age 13, Telma is famous as the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor until threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old Canadian who’s just undergone a mastectomy…Reeyonna believes that auditioning for pregnant-teen porn online will help fulfill her dream of befriending Jennifer Lawrence and Kanye West…Biggie, the neurologically impaired adolescent son of a billionaire, spends his days Google Map-searching his mother --- who abandoned home and family for a new love…Jacquie, a photographer once celebrated for taking arty nudes of her young daughter, is broke and working at Sears Family Portrait Boutique…Tom-Tom, a singer/drug dealer thrown off the third season of “American Idol” for concocting a hard-luck story, is hell-bent on creating her own TV series in the Hollywood Hills, peopled by other reality-show losers…Jerzy, her sometime lover, is a speed-freak paparazzo who “specializes” in capturing images of dying movie and television stars…And Oscar-winning Michael Douglas searches for meaning in his time of remission. While his wife, Catherine, guest-stars on “Glee,” the actor plans a bold, artistic, go-for-broke move: to star in and direct a remake of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz…

Moving forward with the inexorable force of a tsunami, DEAD STARS is Bruce Wagner’s most lavish and remarkable translation yet of the national zeitgeist: post-privacy porn culture, a Kardashianworld of rapid-cycling, disposable narrative where reality-show triumph is the new American narcotic.