American Psycho

Front Cover
Pan Macmillan, 2006 - Fiction - 384 pages

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America’s greatest dream – and its worst nightmare – American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.

‘Serious, clever and shatteringly effective’ Sunday Times

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’ Fay Weldon, Washington Post

‘For its savagely coherent picture of a society lethally addicted to blandness, it should be judged by the highest standards’ John Walsh, Sunday Times

‘That the book’s contents are shocking is downright undeniable, but just as Bonfire of the Vanities exposed the corruption and greed engendered in eighties politics and high living, American Psycho examines the mindless preoccupations of the nineties preppy generation’ Time Out

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About the author (2006)

Bret Easton Ellis was born in Los Angeles, California on March 7, 1964. He attended Bennington College. In 1985, at the age of 23, his first novel, Less Than Zero, was published. His other works include The Rules of Attraction (1987), The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998), Lunar Park (2005), and Imperial Bedrooms (2010). His most controversial book was American Psycho, a book for which he received an advance in the amount of $300,000 from Simon and Schuster, who then refused to publish the book while under attack from women's groups in regards to the content of the book. It was later made into a feature film.

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