American Psycho

by Bret Easton Ellis

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A scathing satire of modern capitalism wrapped in a slick shell of sociopathic sleaze, American Psycho is as grim and disquieting as you'd expect from 1980's Wall Street.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other.

Patrick 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 Love

Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards, coming in January.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679735779
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/06/1991
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	1,952
Product dimensions:	5.13(w) x 7.96(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

BRET EASTON ELLIS is the author of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, Glamorama, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms. His works have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and The Informers have all been made into films. He lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

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, bestselling author of Geek Love
 
“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

From the Publisher