Search Results

“... The marketing blurbs for Bret EastonEllis’s new novel, Imperial Bedrooms, would have it be a sequel to Less than Zero, the 1985 novel that made him famous. It is, after a fashion: all of Ellis’s books are sequels, prequels, spinoffs and derivatives of each other ...”

“... Bret EastonEllis has always been interested in the ways in which people don’t pay attention, and in the cost of attention when it is paid. In the comédie humaine he has been writing since 1985, when his first novel, Less than Zero, was published, his characters, who recur throughout the books, are as torpid and enervated as Balzac’s are driven and determined ...”

“... Will they have to change the time or change the record?’ The line of inquiry might be applied to Bret EastonEllis (for one), who, in pushing to the limit the current parameters of literary transgression, effectively landed us in the vicinity of zero with his last book, American Psycho: Back in my bedroom, Christie ...”

“... novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and Morgan Entrekin, the editor at Simon and Schuster who acquired Bret EastonEllis’s Less than Zero. Lish had the cult cred, but their properties shone the brightest. Gary and Morgan, Morgan and Gary, Jay and Bret, ...”

“... House of Leaves (Anchor, £13), published on paper to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Bret EastonEllis has said that ‘it renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Pynchon and Ballard and Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Mark Danielewski’s feet, choking with ...”

“... 86 million in 1980 – which is, again, roughly the period between surrenders. The characters in Bret EastonEllis’s precocious first novel are also getting used to life in a land of plenty of nothing, although they are relatively well-heeled nihilists – the sons and daughters of wealthy Californians, on college ...”

“... on her way to a bar where Pete is holding forth. She decides not to go in. Andrew Martin isn’t Bret EastonEllis taking eight hundred pages to demonstrate that the world of high fashion is a bit shallow. Early Work is humane, and the characters are lovable even as they get blitzed in dive bars on a Wednesday ...”

“... no’ is the honest reply. If you thought that it couldn’t get more disgusting than Bret EastonEllis then you were wrong. The book opens with a banal question at a London dinner party: ‘What’s your idea of fun?’ The narrator, Ian Wharton, makes all too clear that his answer to the question ups the ...”

“... or make impure. But compared to other cosseted young people in satire – in Evelyn Waugh or Bret EastonEllis, say – Ray doesn’t seem amoral and culpable so much as confused and pathetic. And Dunthorne remains surprisingly sympathetic to his plight, as he becomes an ‘unusual person’: the sort of person ...”

“... novel I have seen recently which has been compared with The Catcher in the Rye, the other being Bret EastonEllis’s Less than Zero. Neither of them is remotely as good as the comparison makes out: but Less than Zero (‘Snorting Coke in LA’) has less right to it than Bright Lights, Big City (‘Snorting Coke in ...”

“... shoving it in. Then I crawled across the room and sat cross-legged, watching him bleed to death. Bret EastonEllis tried the same kind of scenes in American Psycho. Yet Ellis’s protagonist killed with glee, and thrilled at getting away with it. He was a wealthy and successful New ...”

“... too, drops many literary clues: Frannie assigns her creative-writing students Orwell, Tolstoy and Bret EastonEllis, rather than Brighton Rock, in which the murderer, holding a straight razor, says deadpan, ‘Such tits,’ or Naipaul’s Guerrillas because the ‘beating, murdering and dismembering of women’ may ...”

“... aged and all alone.’ The casual way he takes and talks about drugs is reminiscent of a novel by Bret EastonEllis or Tao Lin, but Thirlwell goes below the blank affect to focus on the manic energy of solipsism. The plot might sound noirish, but the novel doesn’t try to entertain with suspense. Javier Marías’s ...”

“... imagination. He fulfils a general desire to believe that the human psyche is not fully explicable. Bret EastonEllis’s new novel, American Psycho, is an attempt to tell the story of a serial murder through a first-person narrative conducted by the murderer himself. The novel has had very bad reviews and quite a lot of ...”

“... Public Enemy’s angry invectives, and was up to my ears in Sonic Youth … I wrote an essay on Bret EastonEllis and corporate capitalism.’ In general the younger self he depicts is worldlier and luckier and less purposefully shaped than the analogous figures in the fiction – almost as if writers make things ...”