American Psycho: a novel (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

9780679735779: American Psycho: a novel (Vintage Contemporaries)
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The controversial novel about a handsome serial killer who moves among the young and trendy in 1980s New York.

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Review:
Brett Easton Ellis established a reputation as the enfant terrible of American fiction in the 1980s with his controversial novel Less than Zero, but with the publication of American Psycho he became established as one of the most notorious and reviled novelists currently writing. American Psycho deserves its controversy. The novel opens with a sign scrawled above a New York subway station: "Abandon hope all ye who enter". So begins a hellish descent into the world of Patrick Bateman, the novel's protagonist. Bateman is a handsome 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie, who spends his days listening to Whitney Houston and working out which exclusive restaurant to eat in and what clothes to wear in a dizzying parody of 1980s consumerism run mad.

However, Bateman also has a darker side; he is a psychopathic serial killer, with a penchant for torturing and sexually abusing young women before killing them in the most gruesome and explicit fashion. The novel contains little actual plot, and consists of extended descriptions of exclusive restaurants, designer clothes, TV shows and the minutiae of Bateman's vacuous world, relieved only by clinically described scenes of torture and mutilation which are not for the faint-hearted. Bateman makes little attempt to justify his actions, merely claiming that "this is the way the world--my world--moves". As a satire on the bankrupt, money-driven world of the 1980s, American Psycho is a successful, if rather heavy-handed piece of fiction, whose controversy seems only set to increase. --Jerry Brotton

Review:
"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

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  • PublisherVintage Books
  • Publication date1991
  • ISBN 10 0679735771
  • ISBN 13 9780679735779
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages432
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780330536301: American Psycho: Bret Easton Ellis

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780330536301
Publisher: Picador, 2011
Softcover

  • 9781447277705: American Psycho

    Picador, 2015
    Softcover

  • 9780330372480: American Psycho

    Picador, 1998
    Hardcover

  • 9780307278630: American Psycho (Vintage Contemporaries)

    Vintage, 2006
    Softcover

  • 9780671663971: American Psycho

    Simon ..., 1991
    Hardcover

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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER In this modern classic, the acclaimed author of The Shards explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. "A seminal book. The Washington PostPatrick 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.A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitious, inspiring piece of writing. An important book. Katherine Dunn, bestselling author of Geek LoveLook for Bret Easton Elliss latest novel, The Shards! In a black satire of the eighties, a decade of naked greed and unparalleled callousness, a successful Wall Street yuppie cannot get enough of anything--including murder. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780679735779

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