Imperial Bedrooms - Softcover

Ellis, Bret Easton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307742288 ISBN 13: 9780307742285

Publisher: Random House USA, 2011

Synopsis

Bret Easton Ellis’s debut, Less Than Zero, is one of the signal novels of the last thirty years, and he now follows those infamous teenagers into an even more desperate middle age.

Clay, a successful screenwriter, has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and he’s soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his former girlfriend, is married to Trent, an influential manager who’s still a bisexual philanderer, and their Beverly Hills parties attract various levels of fame, fortune and power. Then there’s Clay’s childhood friend Julian, a recovering addict, and their old dealer, Rip, face-lifted beyond recognition and seemingly even more sinister than in his notorious past.

But Clay’s own demons emerge once he meets a gorgeous young actress determined to win a role in his movie. And when his life careens completely out of control, he has no choice but to plumb the darkest recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal.

A genuine literary event.

About this title

Review:

'The cult author's brilliant, disturbing 1985 debut - about the empty lives of LA teenagers - was a literary smash at the time, and is being re-released ahead of next month's much-anticipated follow-up Imperial Bedrooms - a book that will be THE cultural ralking point of the summer. Read or re-read now.' --Grazia - The Barometer

'You won't read a better book this summer. Nasty but nice.'
-- Art Review

'Cunningly weaving his personal anxieties into this fictional story reminds us that, no matter how nihilistic and derogatory Ellis's work may seem, at it's core is a writer who is deeply concerned with the direction our culture is taking.' --HUH magazine

'The poster boy for `80's excess returns with this sequel to Less Than Zero. Twenty-five years on, LA's spoilt rich kids are all grown up but still embroiled in the debauchery of Hollywood. Here, Ellis displays a newly emotional and sinister tone. A creepy, brutal, absorbing read.' --Grazia

'In 1983, Bret Easton Ellis wrote Less Than Zero, pretty much the ultimate teen novel. In this sequel the same characters are just as wasted and rich. A frantic and funny glimpse of the darker side of Hollywood, it makes you ask, "Is this what it's like on The Hills?' --Heat

'In terms of American literary inheritance, Easton Ellis adds the playful self-advertisements of Philip Roth to the ambiguously complicit social reportage of F Scott Fitzgerald. Imperial Bedrooms ranks with his best exercises in the latter register, teeming with sharp details of a narcissistic generation.' --Guardian

'Densely, even hectically plotted. Carrying an epigraph from Raymond Chandler, it is a murder mystery - a woozy, paranoid, hallucinatory version of LA noir.'
--Sunday Times

'Imperial Bedrooms itself is almost defiantly appalling and sickening, but it is also brilliantly written and coolly self-aware...[it] has a thriller's pace and structure, drawing momentum from our desire to find out who is behind the hideous mutilation of a body displayed a few pages in. At the same time, like it or not, the novel dabbles in philosophical waters...Here, as in Less Than Zero, Ellis is plumbing the depths of human nature, exposing it at its worst. His writing is existentialist to the extent that it confronts the minimal limits of identity.' --Observer

'If you want to feel a whole lot better about your life, revisit Bret Easton Ellis's seminal Eighties' hedonists from Less Than Zero in the apocalyptic Imperial Bedrooms.' --InStyle UK Culture Club

'Ellis deserves his cult status and there is no sense of him going soft on us here. The wry dialogue, the brittle, heartless sex, and the sense of civilisation tumbling as the LA brat pack (now middle-aged) grab and fornicate are no less powerful . . . you won't want to miss this one.' --Readers Digest

Book Description:

Twenty-five years on from Less Than Zero, we pick up again with Clay

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House USA
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0307742288
• ISBN 13: 9780307742285
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 169