Less Than Zero - Softcover

Ellis, Bret Easton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679781498 ISBN 13: 9780679781493

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Synopsis

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 L.A. after dark.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

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

-- Fay Weldon, Washington Post

"What's rarely said in all the furor over this novel is that it's a satire, a hilarious, repulsive, boring, seductive, deadpan satire...Ellis is, first and last, a moralist. Under cover of his laconic voice, every word in his three novels to date springs from grieving outrage at our spiritual condition... Ambition alone sets it apart from most contemporary fiction. Prudes, squares and feminist commissars aside, the rest of us should applaud Brat Easton Ellis for setting out in this noble and dangerous direction."

-- Henry Bean, front page, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"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 have come to on the clock...He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that anymore."

-- Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair

From the Inside Flap:

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, 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, in a
world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money 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 L.A. after dark.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679781498
• ISBN 13: 9780679781493
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208