Ez Keneret and Wendell Spear are Hollywood veterans who have committed the only sin in the movie business: they've grown old. Having been cast aside, they face their obsolescence and the harsh reality that the art they appreciate (and profit from) is just a business powered by money and celebrity. While Spear is consoled and comforted by his granddaughter, Keneret centers his comeback film on Leet de Loor, a stunning but painfully wooden "actress" he discovers in Fiji.

Richard Stern was born in 1928 in New York City and published his first novel, Golk, in 1960. Among his twenty books are In Any Case, which won the Friends of Literature Prize; Natural Shocks, winner of the Sandburg Prize for Novel of the Year; Noble Rot: Stories 1949-1988, named the Sun-Times Book of the Year; Stitch; Other Men's Daughters; and A Sistermony, which was awarded the Heartland Prize for Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year. In 1985 he won the Medal of Merit for the Novel given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Stern is Regenstein Professor of English at the University of Chicago and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"Richard Stern is a deft, surprising, and thoroughly original novelist. Pacific Tremors is literate, it's smart, it's affecting. It richly succeeds." --Richard Ford

"Pacific Tremors is brilliant. It sparkles. It has some wonderful scenes, beautifully unfolded, and it builds a surprisingly sympathetic yet clear-eyed picture of a world of Hollywood moviemakers and hangers-on that challenges and undermines the stereotypes without being sentimental and without blurring its focus. In short, a fine novel." --Austin Wright, author of Tony and Susan