Less Than Zero

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The timeless classic from the acclaimed author of American Psycho about the lost generation of 1980s Los Angeles who experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. • The basis for the cult-classic film "Possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." —The New York Times They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho delivers a riveting, tour-de-force sequel to Less Than Zero, set on the seedy side of Los Angeles. • "A haunting vision of disillusionment, twenty-first-century style" (People). Returning to Los Angeles from New York, Clay, now a successful screenwriter, is casting his new movie. Soon he is running with his old circle of friends through L.A.’s seedy side. His ex-girlfriend, Blair, is married to Trent, a bisexual philanderer and influential manager. Then there's Julian, a recovering addict, and Rip, a former dealer. Then when Clay meets a gorgeous young actress who will stop at nothing to be in his movie, his own dark past begins to shine through, and he has no choice but to dive into the recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

Perry the Penguin needs 9 clams to buy an ice scooter -- but he's not very good at saving. As Perry earns, spends, finds, loses, and borrows clams, a simple line graph demonstrates the concept of negative numbers.

LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com. This book sets out to explain the complexity of why increased production does not that always bring with it lower prices. According to the book, those who look upon monetary expansion as a way to eradicate almost all unemployment fail to appreciate that persistent unemployment is a non-monetary or 'natural' economic condition, which no mount of monetary medicine can cure. Selgin explores the differences between these monetary and natural conditions, and proposes solutions of his own.

From the New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero comes a nihilistic novel set in the early eighties that portrays a chilling descent into the abyss beneath L.A.'s gorgeous surfaces. • “Skillfully accomplishes its goal of depicting a modern moral wasteland…. Arguably Ellis's best.” —The Boston Globe The basis of the major motion picture starring Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, The Informers is a seductive and chillingly nihilistic novel, in which Bret Easton Ellis, returns to Los Angeles, the city whose moral badlands he portrayed so unforgettably in Less Than Zero. This time is the early eighties. The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers. In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in that city. Dirk sees his best friend killed in a desert car wreck, then rifles through his pockets for a last joint before the ambulance comes. Cheryl, a wannabe newscaster, chides her future stepdaughter, “You're tan but you don't look happy.” Jamie is a clubland carnivore with a taste for human blood. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

Own it, snowflakes: you've lost everything you claim to hold dear. White is Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction. Already the bad boy of American literature, from Less Than Zero to American Psycho, Ellis has also earned the wrath of right-thinking people everywhere with his provocations on social media, and here he escalates his admonishment of received truths as expressed by today's version of "the left." Eschewing convention, he embraces views that will make many in literary and media communities cringe, as he takes aim at the relentless anti-Trump fixation, coastal elites, corporate censorship, Hollywood, identity politics, Generation Wuss, "woke" cultural watchdogs, the obfuscation of ideals once both cherished and clear, and the fugue state of American democracy. In a young century marked by hysterical correctness and obsessive fervency on both sides of an aisle that's taken on the scale of the Grand Canyon, White is a clarion call for freedom of speech and artistic freedom. "The central tension in Ellis's art—or his life, for that matter—is that while [his] aesthetic is the cool reserve of his native California, detachment over ideology, he can't stop generating heat.... He's hard-wired to break furniture."—Karen Heller, The Washington Post "Sweating with rage . . . humming with paranoia."—Anna Leszkiewicz, The Guardian "Snowflakes on both coasts in withdrawal from Rachel Maddow's nightly Kremlinology lesson can purchase a whole book to inspire paroxysms of rage . . . a veritable thirst trap for the easily microaggressed. It's all here. Rants about Trump derangement syndrome; MSNBC; #MeToo; safe spaces."—Bari Weiss, The New York Times

"I like a good detective story, but they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that." So remarks esteemed criminologist Mr. Treves. Truer words have never been spoken, for a psychopathic killer has insinuated himself , with cunning manipulation, into a quiet village on the river Tern. But who is his intended victim? What are his unfathomable motives? And how and when will he reach the point of murder...the zero point? In the ingenious and noteworthy departure for Agatha Christie, it's the intricate workings of a pathological mind that becomes the stuff of startling mystery as group of friends at a seaside resort remain blithely unaware that their weekend will be the death of them all...

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar I), course: American Postmodern Literature, language: English, abstract: With his debut novel Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis set a milestone for a generation, who needed a voice. First published in 1985 when he was 21 and still at Bennington College, Ellis is now considered as the 'celebrity author' of the postmodern era, using the minimalist style for which the novel became famous. Writers of postmodern fiction, also called 'Blank Fiction', elegantly use a minimalist plot with flat characters in a simple style and as validated member of the 'Brat Pack', Ellis combines urban life, violence, drugs and consumerism. In the novel we follow Clay, the 18-year-old protagonist and student at Camden College in New Hampshire, coming back to Los Angeles for Christmas break. Experiencing several parties, concerts, affairs and drugs with his old friends, Clay explores the apathy, boredom and alienation from his old life. Although criticized for Ellis's straight nihilism, integrating his own celebrity persona into his art and creating a universe of immature characters who seem to grow older but without any growing effect, it is questionable, if Less Than Zero is only just that – a world inhabited by rich and shallow characters without any purpose. With the help of Jean Baudrillard's simulation theory and Sartre's theory of Being and Nothingness, which will be introduced before analyzing the novel, this paper will address Clays world of simulacra and Nothingness and argue for this being the purpose of the novel; creating a meaningless world. Through conversations and media, a Clay becomes visible, who seeks for more beyond the surface and shallowness and although the novel does not seem to follow a red thread, it suggests that Ellis as an author of 'blank fiction' is well aware of what he is doing with Less Than Zero. How can a novel be a how-to-torture, but also a book of serious ambition? (Baelo-Allué 2011) This paper will show that an 'in-between' is possible; an 'in-between' between “pornographic gore” and “serious postmodern literature” - and maybe the two phrases do not contradict each other so much as assumed.