In this follow-up to "The Player," the Hollywood classic that was adapted into the celebrated movie by Robert Altman, Tolkin again delivers a brilliant, incisive portrait of power, wealth, and family in contemporary society gone out of control with greed and excess.

This provocative new book presents the collaborative paintings of Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, among today's sharpest observers of the culture of pleasure, their art inseparable from the world in which it finds expression.

Los Angeles is both background and subject in the respective oeuvres of Israel and Ellis. For Israel, the American dream, as embodied by the L.A. mythos, remains affecting and potent, and he approaches his hometown with an uncanny coupling of local familiarity and anthropological curiosity. While Ellis, who became famous for his portrait of an amoral, decadent...