Bret Easton Ellis is no stranger to bad publicity. Ever since his 1985 debut, “Less Than Zero,” made him a literary sensation, his violently nihilistic fiction and his politically incorrect public persona have earned him as much fury as acclaim. And after three decades, five subsequent novels and a story collection, a podcast and more than a handful of media spats, Ellis still has more to say. On April 16, he will publish his first book in nine years — and his nonfiction debut — an essay collection called “White.” Not everybody is going to like it. He doesn't care.
“I feel very loose about this,” he said. “This is kind of a book for a Bret Easton Ellis completist.”
For those who aren't that, a refresher: The (not unmixed) success of that 1985 debut, about the amoral escapades of rich, disaffected Los Angeles adolescents, turned the then-21-year-old college junior into a fixture of the New York social scene, photographed everywhere from the MTV Movie Awards to Nell's nightclub in Manhattan, often with his fellow “literary Brat Pack”-er Jay McInerney. He has recalled his East Village apartment back then as “a cokey den of iniquity.” Critics called him an enfant terrible; fans said he defined his generation.
It was during these prodigal years, after a more conventional second novel was greeted with shrugs, that Ellis wrote the New York noir “American Psycho,” about a soullessly materialistic 26-year-old financier who suffers a breakdown while pathologically committing gruesome acts of rape and murder. Grisly passages leaked to Time and Spy magazines and prompted a public outcry, and in November 1990 Simon & Schuster canceled the book two months before its scheduled release. The editors Sonny Mehta and Gary Fisketjon at Alfred A. Knopf immediately scooped it up, and published it as a Vintage paperback in March 1991.
Read Full Article »
