Less Than Zero

<p><b>In 1985, years before <i>American Psycho</i>, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed the world with his debut novel, <i>Less Than Zero</i>.<br><br>This 40th anniversary edition of the cult classic novel contains an introduction by Rachel Kushner, the Booker Prize-nominated author of <i>Creation Lake</i> and <i>The Mars Room.</i></b><br><br><b>‘Unstoppable . . . The impeccable timing captures the banalities of Clay’s life in a way that both disgusts me and breaks my heart’ </b>– Ottessa Moshfegh, author of <i>My Year of Rest</i><br><br>Eighteen-year-old Clay has come home to LA for Christmas break after his first term at college. Clay is three things: rich, bored, and looking to get high. Reacquainting himself with a world of privilege and limitless indulgence, Clay steps back into the hedonism and moral depravity of his life in California.<br><br>With its relentless scenes of grotesque brutality, <i>Less Than Zero</i> is an unflinching portrait of a lost generation in revolt.<br><br><b>Published when he was just twenty-one, <i>Less Than Zero</i> held an excoriating mirror up to the culture of excess and vapidity of 1980s Los Angeles and made Bret Easton Ellis an instant literary sensation.</b><br><br>‘One of the most telling and striking chroniclers of the void beneath our consumerist society’ – <i>The</i> <i>Guardian</i><br><br>‘Deadly serious social satires masquerading as generic pulp workouts’ – <i>Esquire</i><br><br>‘He is the model of literary filial piety, counting among his parents Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, and Joan Didion’ – <i>The</i> <i>Washington Post</i></p>