(Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, Less than Zero ha...)
Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, Less than Zero has become a timeless classic. This coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of LA after dark.
(Set at a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New Engl...)
Set at a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan 80s, The Rules of Attraction is a startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the future--or even the present - who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle. Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College and treats their sexual posturings and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the center of their lives. Lauren changes boyfriends every time she changes majors and still pines for Victor who split for Europe months ago and she might or might not be writing anonymous love letter to ambivalent, hard-drinking Sean, a hopeless romantic who only has eyes for Lauren, even if he ends up in bed with half the campus, and Paul, Lauren's ex, forthrightly bisexual and whose passion masks a shrewd pragmatism. They waste time getting wasted, race from Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours to Dressed To Get Screwed parties to drinks at The Edge of the World or The Graveyard. The Rules of Attraction is a poignant, hilarious take on the death of romance.
(In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explo...)
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
(The Informers is a seductive and chillingly nihilistic no...)
The Informers is a seductive and chillingly nihilistic novel, in which Bret Easton Ellis, returns to Los Angeles, the city whose moral badlands he portrayed so unforgettably in Less Than Zero. This time is the early eighties. The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers. In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in that city. Dirk sees his best friend killed in a desert car wreck, then rifles through his pockets for a last joint before the ambulance comes. Cheryl, a wannabe newscaster, chides her future stepdaughter, “You're tan but you don't look happy.” Jamie is a clubland carnivore with a taste for human blood. As rendered by Ellis, their interactions compose a chilling, fascinating, and outrageous descent into the abyss beneath LA's gorgeous surfaces.
(The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continue...)
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 on the 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 Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is the bestsellin...)
Bret Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is the bestselling writer whose first novel Less Than Zero catapulted him to international stardom while he was still in college. In the years that followed he found himself adrift in a world of wealth, drugs, and fame, as well as dealing with the unexpected death of his abusive father. After a decade of decadence a chance for salvation arrives; the chance to reconnect with an actress he was once involved with, and their son. But almost immediately his new life is threatened by a freak sequence of events and a bizarre series of murders that all seem to connect to Ellis’s past. His attempts to save his new world from his own demons makes Lunar Park Ellis’s most suspenseful novel. In this chilling tale reality, memoir, and fantasy combine to create not only a fascinating version of this most controversial writer but also a deeply moving novel about love and loss, parents and children, and ultimately forgiveness.
(Bret Easton Ellis’s debut, Less Than Zero, is one of the ...)
Bret Easton Ellis’s debut, Less Than Zero, is one of the signal novels of the last thirty years, and he now follows those infamous teenagers into an even more desperate middle age. 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. Blair, his former girlfriend, is married to Trent, an influential manager who’s still a bisexual philanderer, and their Beverly Hills parties attract various levels of fame, fortune, and power. Then there’s Clay’s childhood friend Julian, a recovering addict, and their old dealer, Rip, face-lifted beyond recognition and seemingly even more sinister than in his notorious past. But Clay’s own demons emerge once he meets a gorgeous young actress determined to win a role in his movie. And when his life careens completely out of control, he has no choice but to plumb the darkest recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal.
(In White, Ellis pours himself out onto the page and, in d...)
In White, Ellis pours himself out onto the page and, in doing so, eviscerates the perceived good that the social-media age has wrought, starting with the dangerous cult of likeability. White is both a denunciation of censorship, particularly the self-inflicted sort committed in hopes of being "accepted," and a bracing view of a life devoted to authenticity. Provocative, incisive, funny, and surprisingly poignant, White reveals not only what is visible on the glittering, pristine surface but also the riotous truths that are hidden underneath.
Bret Easton Ellis is an American author, screenwriter, and short story writer. His works have been translated into 27 languages. Ellis was first regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney. He is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style.
Background
Bret Easton Ellis was born on March 7, 1964, in Los Angeles and raised in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley. His father, Robert Martin Ellis, was a property developer, and his mother, Dale (Dennis) Ellis, was a homemaker. They divorced in 1982. Ellis stated, during the initial release of his third novel American Psycho, that his father was abusive, and he became the basis of that book's best-known character Patrick Bateman. Later Ellis claimed the character was not in fact based on his father, but on Ellis himself, saying that all of his work came from a specific place of pain he was going through in his life during the writing of each of his books. Ellis claims that while his family life growing up was somewhat difficult due to the divorce, he mostly had an "idyllic" California childhood.
Education
Ellis was educated at The Buckley School in California; he then attended Bennington College in Vermont, where he originally studied music then gradually gravitated to writing, which had been one of his passions since childhood. There he met and befriended Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem, who both would later become published writers. Bennington College was also where Ellis completed a novel he had been working on for many years. That book, Less Than Zero, went on to be published while Ellis was just 21 and still in college.
Ellis made his writing debut with the novel Less Than Zero that was published in 1985. The novel received mixed reviews from critics yet climbed the bestselling list of books. It took him five years to produce that novel as he wrote and rewrote about his personal experiences which later transform from journal entries into novel form. Less Than Zero has a zeitgeist feel to it as it narrates the story of discontented wealthy teenagers of Los Angeles. After the success and controversy of Less Than Zero in 1985, Ellis became closely associated and good friends with fellow Brat Pack writer Jay McInerney: the two became known as the "toxic twins" for their highly publicized late night debauchery.
In 1987 Ellis produced his second novel entitled, The Rules of Attraction. Being a little too autographical it could not manage to surpass the success of Ellis’ previous work. The narrative technique employed in the novel is stream-of-consciousness. The disaffectedness was still fully intact, but here it was richer and headier. This book is also the perfect lampoon of the pretension and partying and ridiculousness that happens at liberal-arts colleges. Moreover, Ulysses by James Joyce remains a highly influential source for the novel.
In Ellis literary career 1991 proved to be the most controversial year with the release of his psychological drama, American Psycho. The novel is regarded as one of the appalling and repulsive literature work by the majority of critics and feminists. It was the highly graphic violence and misogynistic content of the work that earned Ellis a notorious reputation among writers. The ‘transgressive art’ form applied in the novel had Ellis’ publishers withdrew the publishing contract. It has now been regarded as Ellis' magnum opus, garnering acknowledgment from a number of academics. The first person narrative of American Psycho recounts the story of a Manhattan businessman with a disturbing personality of a serial killer. According to Ellis himself, the character of Patrick Bateman is constructed out of extreme loneliness, self-hatred, and bleak atmosphere and to whom he identifies himself somewhat. Despite generating every kind of controversy the book was later adapted into a movie by Mary Harron, starring Christian Bale as the lead. The big-screen adaptation ended up not only obtaining encouraging feedback but a cult status.
The Informers (1994), a collection of short stories, seemingly linked by the same continuity, was offered to Ellis’s publisher during Glamorama's long writing history. An impressionistic composite of narrative voices, this novel presents the estrangement between the generations and between the sexes in affluent Los Angeles. Images of anomie and personal and familial dissociation are interwoven with scenes of sexual violence that accelerate as the novel shifts into gothic fantasy, with vampires preying on their victims, and then moves toward a conclusion with the depiction of the sexual assault, torture, and murder of a child. The willfully blind romantic fantasy that concludes the novel would seem to draw attention to the cultural disavowal of what Ellis, speaking of the 1980s, has described as "the absolute banality of a perverse decade." A film version of the book has been produced from a script by Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki and was screened at the 2009 Sundance film festival.
Glamorama (1998) is Ellis’s longest and most complex novel. It’s about, in part, supermodels becoming terrorists. In 1999, the contemporary Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero wrote a composition for chamber ensemble entitled Glamorama Spies, which was inspired by the novel.
Lunar Park (2005) is Ellis’s strangest novel and also one of his best. Lunar Park is marked as a pseudo-memoir as it keeps fading in and out of Ellis’s true memoirs into a fictional story. The absurd realm of the story keeps shifting from Ellis’ mock account of his life into a grim tale, leaving a powerful impact on readers. The main character is named Bret Easton Ellis. This character has written books with titles like Less Than Zero and American Psycho. But rather than a roman à clef, which the first little bit of the book leads a reader to expect, Lunar Park is really a horror novel that’s on par with anything by Stephen King. The book features mysterious emails from dead people, fictional characters (American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman and, perhaps, Less Than Zero’s Clay) come to life, ghosts, and a possessed bloodthirsty children’s toy. The book had been able to garner a positive response from critics and readers.
Imperial Bedrooms was released on June 15, 2010, it is the sequel to Less Than Zero. The action of the novel takes place twenty-five years after Less Than Zero. Its story follows Clay, a New York-based screenwriter after he returns to Los Angeles to cast his new film. There he becomes embroiled in the sinister world of his former friends and confronts the darker aspects of his own personality. The novel opens with a literary device that suggests the possibility that the narrator of Imperial Bedrooms may not be the same as the narrator of Less Than Zero although both are ostensibly narrated by Clay. In doing this, Ellis is able to comment on the earlier novel's style and on the development of its moralistic film adaptation. In the novel, Ellis explores Clay's pathological narcissism, masochistic and sadistic tendencies, and exploitative personality, which had been less explicit in Less Than Zero. Ellis chose to do this in part to dispel the sentimental reputation Less Than Zero has accrued over the years, that of "an artifact of the 1980s". Imperial Bedrooms retains Ellis's characteristic transgressive style and applies it to the 2000s (decade) and 2010s, covering amongst other things, the impact of new communication technologies on daily lives.
Ellis began working on what would become Imperial Bedrooms during the development of his 2005 novel, Lunar Park. As with his previous works, Imperial Bedrooms depicts scenes of sex, extreme violence, and hedonism in a minimalist style devoid of emotion.
In 2012 Ellis wrote the screenplay for the independent film The Canyons and helped raise money for its production. The film was released in 2013 and although critically panned, was a small financial success, with the performance of Lindsay Lohan in the lead role earning some positive reviews.
On November 18, 2013, Ellis launched a podcast with PodcastOne Studios. The aim for the show, which delivers 1-hour segments, is to have Ellis engage in open and honest conversation with his guests about their work, inspirations, life experiences as well as music and movies. Ellis, who has always been averse to publicity, has been using the platform to engage in intellectual conversation and debate about his own theoretical observations on the media, the film industry, the music scene and the analog vs. digital age in a generational context. Notable guests have included Kanye West, Marilyn Manson, Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, Kevin Smith, Michael Ian Black, Matt Berninger, Brandon Boyd, BJ Novak, Gus Van Sant, Joe Swanberg, Ezra Koenig, Stephen Malkmus, John Densmore, Fred Armisen & Carrie Brownstein, Ivan Reitman, and Adam Carolla.
Ellis's latest book White (2019), was released on April 16, 2019. It is his first non-fiction book. White is an incendiary polemic about this young century’s failings, e-driven and definition, and defense of what “freedom of speech” truly means.
(Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, Less than Zero ha...)
1985
Religion
When asked, if he believes in God, Ellis said: "Are you asking me if I was raised in a religious family or if I go to church? I was raised an agnostic. I don’t know - I hate to fly, I have a fear of flying. That means either that I have no faith in air-traffic controllers or that I’ve done something really bad, and this is God’s way of getting at me. Maybe I’m caught in the middle… But no, I don’t believe in God. That’s such a strange thing to admit in an interview."
Politics
Ellis said in a chat with Eli Roth in Interview magazine that while he'd never seen himself as a Republican or conservative, living with his "millennial communist" musician boyfriend Todd Michael Schultz, has forced him to take on a more central understanding of politics because he's not totally anti-Trump.
Ellis - who states he didn't vote in the election because he didn't "buy into" the Republican or Democrat parties - argues that these days "everyone has to be the same" or risk being labeled "racist or a misogynist".
Calling Trump the "poster-boy antithesis of the proud moral superiority" and claiming Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama were depicted as people to be taken more seriously, Ellis believes this helped Trump become the unsuspecting winner.
"The way the legacy media was covering the election of 2016 - Clinton as heroine, Trump as villain - would prove to be an utter moral disaster for the country because it helped turn Donald Trump into the biggest underdog in American political history."
"I live with a Trump-hating, millennial socialist. I am not, as my boyfriend will tell everyone, political. I’m interested in the theater of it, how each side plays the game, and how the media has morphed with it. I have never seen liberals be more annoying than they are now."
"When my traumatized boyfriend criticized me for not being angrier about the election (five months after it had happened) I shot back that I didn't want to talk about Trump anymore. I didn't care. He was elected president. Get over it."
"I believe in identity politics, and that I vote with my penis. It’s suggesting that immigration, the economy, and other policies matter so much less than whether I can marry a man. It’s not something that I worry about or is on my mind. That’s the problem with identity politics, and it’s what got Hillary into trouble. If you have a vagina, you had to vote for Hillary. This has seeped into a bedrock credo among a lot of people, and you’ve gotta step back. People are not one-issue voters. I am not going to vote as a gay man, and I don’t think the idea of us not being allowed to marry is going to happen. Pence has his issues, but Trump is not an anti-gay president in any way, shape or form. I also have gay friends who support and voted for Trump, based on certain policies. It’s not just about being gay and being able to marry."
Views
When asked in an interview in 2002 whether he was gay, Ellis explained that he did not identify as gay or straight, but was comfortable being thought of as homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual, and enjoyed playing with his persona, identifying variously as gay, straight, and bisexual to different people over the years.
In a 1999 interview Ellis suggested that his reluctance to definitively label his sexuality was for "artistic reasons": "if people knew that I was straight, they'd read [my books] in a different way. If they knew I was gay, 'Psycho' would be read as a different book." In an interview with Robert F. Coleman, Ellis said he had "indeterminate sexuality," that "any other interviewer out there will get a different answer and it just depends on the mood I am in." In a 2011 interview with James Brown, Ellis again said that his answers to questions about his sexuality have varied from interviewer to interviewer, and cited an example where his reluctance to refuse the label "bi" had him labeled as such by a Details interviewer. "I think the last time I slept with a woman was five or six years ago, so the big thing can only be played out so long," he clarified. "But I still use it, I still say it." Responding to Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign, aimed at preventing suicide among LGBT youth, Ellis tweeted: "Not to bum everyone out, but can we get a reality check here? It gets worse." In a 2012 op-ed for The Daily Beast, while apologizing for a series of controversial tweets, Ellis came out as a gay man.
Quotations:
"I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies. If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically. That's why I think, personally, that they're very tricky to adapt - that, and the fact that my narrators are semi-secretive and unreliable at times."
"When you become well known the first year is really, really fun and then you spend the rest of your life humiliated or trying to avoid humiliation. Everyone is so nice to you in that first year and then they all want to see something different. They want to see you get fucked up a bit and they want to take you down. It's just the nature of the world. You can deal with it or you can fight it. Whatever. Then I realized how - this sounds like such a cliché - empty it all is. There is nothing there. It's an idea. It's a concept. It's not real."
"Every one of my books is an exercise in voice and character, an exploration, through a male narrator who is always the same age I am at the time, of the pain I'm dealing with in my life."
"I feel like I'm not smart enough to answer the questions I'm asked."
Personality
Bret Easton Ellis possesses a great talent for creativity and self-expression, typical of many accomplished writers, poets, actors, and musicians. He is also witty, owns the gift for gab, and savors the limelight.
Ellis is optimistic and masters the resilience to overcome many setbacks. Thanks to his gift for self-expression, he can be the life of the party, and the center of attention. When used constructively, Ellis's talent for self-expression can be a great inspiration force in the world, uplifting others, and bringing much success and happiness to him. However, Bret Easton Ellis could easily squander his talent by becoming a social butterfly. Ellis is optimistic and possesses the resilience to overcome many setbacks. He is socially active, popular, and inspires people with his sunny "happy go lucky" attitude.
Interests
Writers
Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert and Dennis Cooper
Music & Bands
Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen
Connections
Bret Easton Ellis is openly gay. When Ellis wrote Imperial Bedrooms, he was working through his return to the city of his childhood, following the sudden death of his partner of six years. Ellis’s longtime boyfriend, Michael Wade Kaplan, died of a drug-related heart attack, at 30.
As of 2019, Ellis lives with his boyfriend - musician Todd Michael Schulz.