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 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 Post

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

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 latest novel, The Shards!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679735779
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/06/1991
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	5,492
Product dimensions:	5.17(w) x 7.98(h) x 0.91(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.

What People are Saying About This

Katherine Dunn

A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitions, inspiring piece of writing, which has large elements of Jane Austen at her vitriolic best. An important book.

Norman Mailer

The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes . . . [Ellis] is showing older authors where the hands have come to on the clock . . . He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novelists try for that anymore.

Fay Weldon

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 the culture; and he's done it brilliantly. . . A seminal book.

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

This review is based on the galley issued by Ellis's original publisher, Simon & Schuster, before it cancelled the book. The book is now going through the editing process at Vintage. There may be some changes in the final version. The indignant attacks on Ellis's third novel will make it difficult for most readers to judge it objectively. Although the book contains horrifying scenes, they must be read in the context of the book as a whole; the horror does not lie in the novel itself, but in the society it reflects. In the first third of the book, Pat Bateman, a 26-year-old who works on Wall Street, describes his designer lifestyle in excruciating detail. This is a world in which the elegance of a business card evokes more emotional response than the murder of a child. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, Bateman calmly and deliberately blinds and stabs a homeless man. From here, the body count builds, as he kills a male acquaintance and sadistically tortures and murders two prostitutes, an old girlfriend, and a child he passes in the zoo. The recital of the brutalization is made even more horrible by the first-person narrator's delivery: flat, matter-of-fact, as impersonal as a car parts catalog. The author has carefully constructed the work so that the reader has no way to understand this killer's motivations, making it even more frightening. If these acts cannot be explained, there is no hope of protection from such random, senseless crimes. This book is not pleasure reading, but neither is it pornography. It is a serious novel that comments on a society that has become inured to suffering.
— Nora Rawlinson

Library Journal