American Psycho - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Bret Easton Ellis (Paperback)

Number of Pages: 432
Genre: Fiction + Literature Genres
Sub-Genre: Horror
Series Title: Vintage Contemporaries
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Age Range: Adult
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Language: English

About the Book

Vintage is rushing to put out the controversial book that everyone's talking about--especially after Simon & Schuster decided at the last minute not to publish it. Described by Publishers Weekly as "a grisly, gritty gross-out (about) the cool yuppie lifestyle of Patrick Bateman, 26, whose avocation is torturing and dismembering his female victims and festooning his apartment with their body parts", this new book by the author of Less Than Zero is sure to cause a stir.

Book Synopsis

The modern classic, the basis of a Broadway musical, and major motion picture from Lion's Gate Films starring Christian Bale, Chloe Sevigny, Jared Leto, and Reese Witherspoon, and directed by Mary Harron.

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.

Review Quotes

"Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer [and] American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel.... The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of culture; and he's done it brilliantly.... A seminal book." --Fay Weldon, The Washington Post

"A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitious, inspiring piece of writing, which has large elements of Jane Austen at her vitriolic best. An important book." --Katherine Dunn

"A great novel. What Emerson said about genius, that it's the return of one's rejected thoughts with an alienated majesty, holds true for American Psycho.... There is a fever to the life of this book that is, in my reading, unknown in American literature." --Michael Tolkin

"The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes.... [Ellis] is showing older authors where the hands come to on the clock." --Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair

About the Author

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, Glamorama, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms. His works have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and The Informers have all been made into films. He lives in Los Angeles.