Six titles that explore the machinery behind celebrity culture

Candice Wuehle is author of Monarch, Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed, Death Industrial Complex, and BOUND. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Her new novel is Ultranatural.

At Lit Hub Wuehle tagged six books that explore the machinery behind celebrity culture. "Taken together, they suggest that celebrity has always been less about visibility and more about narrative control." One title on the list:

Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama

Bret Easton Ellis’s hallucinatory satire of the 1990s fashion world imagines celebrity culture metastasizing into something far darker. Models, actors, and socialites drift through a world of cameras, parties, and manufactured identities until the line between publicity and conspiracy collapses entirely. As the narrator Victor Ward moves through Manhattan, he registers the world primarily through who is seen and photographed—“the better you looked, the more you were seen”—a logic that turns visibility itself into a form of capital. Glamorama anticipates a future in which fame becomes a spectacle economy, where visibility is both currency and trap. Ellis himself was hardly outside the system he was diagnosing. By the 1990s he had become a literary celebrity in his own right, his novels debated on television, his nightlife chronicled alongside the very models and socialites he fictionalized. The novel reads, in retrospect, less like exaggeration than reportage from inside a culture already learning to treat life as publicity.

Read about the other entries on Wuehle's list at Lit Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue