Bret Easton Ellis is een Amerikaanse auteur wiens werk thema's als moraliteit en nihilisme behandelt via zijn personages. Zijn verhalen volgen vaak jonge, lege individuen die zich bewust zijn van hun verdorvenheid en ervoor kiezen daarin te genieten. Terugkerende personages en dystopische locaties, vaak gesitueerd in Los Angeles en New York, verbinden zijn romans. Ellis' schrijven verkent de donkerdere aspecten van de menselijke natuur met een onderscheidende en provocerende stijl.
American psycho is een grimmige, verontrustende zwarte komedie over de excessen van ongebreideld kapitalisme, over hebzucht en oppervlakkigheid. Patrick Bateman is een aantrekkelijke, intelligente jongeman die een vermogen verdient op Wallstreet. Overdag bezoekt hij dure, trendy restaurants en brengt hij zijn lichaam in perfecte conditie in de sportschool. 's Nachts maakt hij zich schuldig aan misdaden die zo gruwelijk zijn dat ze ons verstand te boven gaan.
Deze caleidoscopische tweede roman van Bret Easton Ellis is gesitueerd op het bohémiene Camden College, en verhaalt over drie studenten zonder plan voor de toekomst, die verstrikt raken in een curieuze, romantische driehoeksverhouding.
The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world.In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially. Set in 90s Manhattan, Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. He's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another onthe eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York City history.And now it's time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind. With the same deft satire and savage wit he has brought to his other fiction, Bret Ellis gets beyond the facade and introduces us, unsparingly, to what we always feared was behind it. Glamorama shows us a shadowy looking-glass reality, the juncture where fame and fashion and terror and mayhem meet and then begin to resemble the familiar surface of our lives."
Bret Easton Ellis's new novel explores the end of innocence and the challenging transition from adolescence to adulthood in a vividly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981, where a serial killer targets teenagers. Seventeen-year-old Bret, a senior at Buckley prep school, becomes captivated by the enigmatic new student, Robert Mallory, who harbors a secret while integrating into Bret's close-knit group. As Bret's obsession with Mallory deepens, he becomes increasingly fixated on the Trawler, a serial killer whose threats and acts of violence seem to encroach upon their lives. The eerie coincidences blur the line between reality and Bret's imagination, as he grapples with the dangers surrounding him. Distrustful of his friends and his own perceptions, Bret descends into paranoia and isolation, with the looming connection between the Trawler and Mallory driving the narrative toward a tense climax. Set against the nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., this novel masterfully intertwines fact and fiction, delving into the emotional complexities of Bret's life at seventeen, encompassing themes of sex, jealousy, obsession, and rage. Gripping and darkly humorous, it showcases Ellis's distinctive storytelling prowess.
"Imagine becoming a best-selling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs." "Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety - only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father's, his stepdaughter's doll violently "malfunctions," and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events - a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son's age - Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace event as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania." "Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward a resolution - about love and loss, fathers and sons."--BOOK JACKET.
Ellis offers a first work of nonfiction meditating on the social-media age. The result is both a defense of freedom of speech and a critique of the likeability factor that can impede it.
In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed with his debut novel, Less Than Zero. Published when he was just twenty-one, this extraordinary and instantly infamous work has done more than simply define a genre, it has become a rare thing: a cult classic and a timeless embodiment of the zeitgeist. Twenty-five years on, Less Than Zero continues to be a landmark in the lives of successive generations of readers across the globe.Filled with relentless drinking in seamy bars and glamorous nightclubs, wild, drug-fuelled parties, and dispassionate sexual encounters, Less Than Zero - narrated by Clay, an eighteen-year-old student returning home to Los Angeles for Christmas - is a fierce coming-of-age story, justifiably celebrated for its unflinching depiction of hedonistic youth, its brutal portrayal of the inexorable consequences of such moral depravity, and its author's refusal to condone or chastise such behaviour.
Set in Los Angeles, in the recent past. The birthplace and graveyard of American myths and dreams, the city harbours a group of people trapped between the beauty of their surroundings and their own moral impoverishment. This novel is a chronicle of their voices.
Clay, a successful screenwriter, has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and he's soon drifting through a long-familiar circle that will leave him no choice but to plumb the darkest recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal.
