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 Porsches, 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.
From the New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero comes a nihilistic novel set in the early eighties that portrays a chilling descent into the abyss beneath L.A.'s gorgeous surfaces.
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.
Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!
Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and he works on Wall Street. He is handsome, sophisticated, charming, and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. American Psycho takes us on a head-on collision with America's greatest dream—and its worst nightmare. It is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.
Through the eyes of Bateman, the novel explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. As Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan, his outward success conceals a soul preoccupied with torture and murder, prefiguring an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is the story of two women in the 1980s: gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women—of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth, who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama.
This Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offered good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. As the story unfolds, readers are transported to a time and place where the past's warmth colors the present.