I recently went to Las Vegas for the first, and probably only, time in my life. I hadn't read this book in years, and previously, it hadn't even been my favorite Hunter S. Thompson work. Thompson is dearly missed by many people, and on a personal level, I miss him deeply. He spoke to a true astonishment at the complete, unrelenting fuckedupedness of America and her politics, and he did it with a bite that was deserved and unmatched. He probably could have been a very rich super-novelist of popular, uninspired filth. He probably could have been a brilliant novelist of any kind. But he chose to do what he did, and he did it better than any of his generation. Like Mark Twain, he chronicled American stupidity in the tongue of his generation, and he captured it perfectly, from the insanity of the drug experience to the depravity of American politics. For years, no work of his stood out to me as much as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 or the Gonzo letters. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to me, wasn't his best work. Then I went to Vegas. Suddenly, all the subtle differences between this and his other work made sense, and I realized that he had captured the true tackiness of the truest tacky city on the entire planet (though Dubai with their fucking Island fantasies are likely to take over soon). Fear &amp; Loathing in Las Vegas IS Las Vegas. It's a nightmare, a joke, a blunder of comical, cosmically-fucked proportions. It's not Sin City. It's where Sin goes to die when it's embarrassed for itself. It's where families go on vacations with ten-year-olds, children who get handed fliers for prostitutes. It's the living, pulsing, filthing embodiment of the Holy Dollar. It's sensory overload on a scale drugs can't equal, a place where you almost have to take a brimful of Valium and a pint of ether to feel normal and not feel utterly ashamed at the state of the human condition. It would make you want to blow your brains out if it weren't so goddamned fun, even if you're gay, you hate gambling and hookers make your brain itch. Yet you never, ever feel like it is evil or subversive or curious in any way. It's just about a buck, and every other blink reminds you of it. This is a place where Hunter S. Thompson could easily mingle with a law enforcement convention and not get noticed. This is a place where a lawyer could leave you with a hotel bill. This is a place where no questions get asked because no answers would make sense, and the only thing profound about any of it is that you know, on a gut level, that all the oil used to produce all the plastic used to build that city no doubt funded an island shaped like Australia that was built off the coast of the UAE over the weekend. This novel will never cease to be important, and one day, as a cultural artifact of a forgotten culture from a forgotten nation, it will be one of the most important anthropological pieces in existence. I wish he'd survived the Bush administration. We need this man.NC

The bestselling novel by Irvine Welsh that provided the inspiration for Danny Boyle’s hit film Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.

Mark Renton has it all: he's good-looking, young, with a pretty girlfriend and a place at university. But there's no room for him in the 1980s. Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his family starts to fracture, Mark's life swings out of control and he succumbs to the defeatism which has taken hold in Edinburgh's grimmer areas. The way out is heroin.It's no better for his friends. Spud Murphy is paid off from his job, Tommy Lawrence feels himself being sucked into a life of petty crime and violence - the worlds of the thieving Matty Connell and psychotic Franco Begbie. Only Sick Boy, the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, seems to ride the current, scamming and hustling his way through it all.Skagboys charts their journey from likely lads to young men addicted to the heroin which has flooded their disintegrating community. This is the 1980s: a time of drugs, poverty, AIDS, violence, political strife and hatred - but a lot of laughs, and maybe just a little love; a decade which changed Britain for ever. The prequel to the world-renowned Trainspotting, this is an exhilarating and moving book, full of the scabrous humour, salty vernacular and appalling behaviour that has made Irvine Welsh a household name.

Pre-Film ReviewI re-read this novel, before seeing David Cronenberg’s film (see Post 21).SPOILERSThis review reveals what I think about the fate of the protagonist at the end of the novel.My views are based on my interpretation of material that starts at page 55 of the 209 page novel.If this material or my interpretation is incorrect, then the novel leaves you hanging at the end.As my views on the novel as a whole depend on an interpretation of the protagonist’s fate, please don’t read my review if you want to form your own views in isolation.Mutual DedicationIn 1992, Paul Auster dediciated “Leviathan” to Don DeLillo.In 2003, DeLillo repaid the favour by dedicating “Cosmopolis” to Auster.Here is a photo of the two of them [on the left] taken at the baseball with two employees of the Gotham Book Mart by the store’s owner:The Name “Cosmopolis”We are all used to the word “cosmopolitan”, but “cosmopolis” is less commonly used.To the extent that the prefix “cosmo” suggests the world or the universe, it implies that the city is representative of the diversity of the world or the universe.We can probably infer that the city is sophisticated and worldly, has an international rather than provincial character, and is home to many cosmopolitan people.If so, the term would be a perfect description for New York City, where the novel is set.It also applies to ancient Athens and Rome, perhaps the original “world-cities”.Manhattan OdysseyThe novel is largely set in a long white limo that drives its protagonist, 28 year old billionaire and hedge-fund manager Eric Packer, across Manhattan.Most plot summaries describe the purpose of the journey as to enable Eric to get a haircut.However, this misses much of the narrative and metaphorical significance of the journey, not to mention the haircut.The journey is more or less the whole of the length of 47th Street, which runs one-way between 1st Ave and the West Side Highway (called the Joe DiMaggio Highway since just before the publication of the novel).Climbing Down from A Cosmopolitan Triplex in the Heavens...At the 1st Ave end, you’ll find the United Nations Headquarters, perhaps the centre of cosmopolitanism.Eric lives in a triplex close to 1st Ave. The building is not named, but the triplex supposedly cost Eric $104M.At the corner of 47th and 1st is the Trump World Tower, which was completed in 2001.The duplex penthouse in this building failed to sell for $58M, and was eventually split into four units. However, as at 2003, the highest price for an apartment in Manhattan was the $70M paid by hedge-fund manager Martin Zweig for a triplex at the Pierre Hotel owned by Lady Mary Fairfax (of the Australian family that published the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers).Eric’s purchase price represents a 50% increase on the highest price ever paid at the time. You can do that if you're a billionaire.As you drive along 47th Street, you pass the Diamond District, a number of Broadway Theatres and Times Square.Between 1963 and 1968, Andy Warhol’s Factory was on 47th Street between Second and Third Aves....and Descending into Hell’s KitchenOn the West Side, the Street passes into Hell’s Kitchen, also known as Clinton (not named after Bill) or Midtown West (not named after Mae), the original home of Damon Runyon’s stories, Marvel Comics' "Daredevil", gang wars between migrants, and the musical "West Side Story".The Wiki article on Hell’s Kitchen recounts a number of versions of the origin of the area’s name:“…the most common version traces it to the story of Dutch Fred The Cop, a veteran policeman, who with his rookie partner, was watching a small riot on West 39th Street near 10th Avenue. "The rookie is supposed to have said, ‘This place is hell itself,’ to which Fred replied, ‘Hell's a mild climate. This is Hell's Kitchen.’ " Gail Wynand, the newspaper proprietor in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, came from Hell’s Kitchen and in Rand’s novel is described as “Petronius from Hell’s Kitchen”, a description that might also apply to Eric Packer (except that he ends there, rather than originates from there).Interestingly, the original Petronius, believed to be the author of “The Satyricon”, was described as the “elegantiae arbiter” (or the “arbiter elegantiarum”), "the judge of elegance" in the court of the Roman Emperor Nero.West 47th Street has yet to be developed and still contains relatively disused and derelict buildings (including the building that features in the end of “Cosmopolis”), not to mention the homeless and mentally ill treated at “Fountain House” who featured in the documentary “West 47th Street”.Mapping Eric’s ProgressI have included all of this detail (thanks, Wiki), so that I can argue that this journey isn’t just some trip to the barber.It represents a journey along a street that defines the extremes of Manhattan, from the cosmopolitan East Side to the Hellish West Side.Just to help you map Eric’s progress, here are the pages at which his limo passes each Avenue crossing 47th:1st: 92nd: 133rd: 23Lexington: 34 (the hair salon Filles et Garcon actually seems to be at 51st)Park: 38Madison: 415th: 45 (The Presidential Cavalcade)6th: 757th/Broadway: 878th: 1299th: 130 (the Sufi rap artist Brutha Fez's Funeral)10th 158 (the barbershop) 11th: 17012th: 179 (the derelict tenement)This is no mere haircut, this is a low-key to subtle homage to James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, in which our hero leaves the Heaven of his triplex, heads west (young man) and confronts his destiny in a derelict building in Hell’s Kitchen.Perhaps, our hero even meets his anti-hero.Upstairs at Eric’sEric is 28 and has been married to Elise Schifrin for just 22 days.The marriage, so far, is loveless and apparently unconsummated. It represents a symbolic marriage of new American money and traditional European wealth and style, though Elise (“Swiss or something”) is worth a cool $730M herself.Eric has made his money gambling on movements in currencies. He takes immense risks with vast amounts of money and has generated commensurate profits.He is so rich, beyond normal moral or mortal contemplation, some would think it’s indecent and obscene. In the words of his nemesis, Eric is “foully and berserkly rich”.Yet, until recently, Eric has seen his ability as just an example of what the Greeks call “Chrimatistikos”, the art of money-making.He has had talent and drive, which he has "utilised... consistently put to good use." His reward is to live in "a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God", something that aspires to scraping the sky and meeting God, but now in a Godless era seems only to defy the very idea of God and moral virtue or goodness.He contemplates the word "skyscraper":"No recent structure ought to bear this word. It belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born."Just as skyscrapers have lost their narrative drive, so too have money and the art of money-making:"...because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself."Money has turned in on itself, become introverted and meaningless. It no longer tells a story about something else, it does not relate to or measure some other achievement. [The novel echoes some of the concerns of William Gaddis' "The Recognitions", but then DeLillo has always mined similar veins.]There’s a point at which you can have so much money that it becomes senseless, there are just no more narratives or stories you can spin with it, without repeating yourself. [I haven’t reached this point yet.]Checking Eric’s BalanceEric’s life so far has been dictated by balance.He lives in a world “in which every force is balanced by another”. When there is another force, he is the equal and opposite reaction.He takes positions and then waits for corrections to occur. The balancing process improves his bank balance.It also dictates his aesthetic judgments.Two private elevators rise to his triplex: in one the music is Satie, in the other Brutha Fez.He gets artistic advice from 47-year old Didi Francher, an art consultant and one of his mistresses.She’s "taught him how to look, how to feel enchantment damp on his face, the melt of pleasure inside a brushstroke or band of color."In a way, she has created a balance to the crudeness and brutality of his occupation.She has taught him how to reckon outside the world of money.He now looks, he notices things, he gazes, he observes, he assesses, he judges.Like Petronius, he has become an "arbiter elegantiarum", a "judge of elegance".He is obsessed with acquiring a collection of 14 Rothko works housed in the Rothko Chapel:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothko_C...He genuinely appreciates Rothko's art, but his principal motivation for the purchase is the fact that he can afford to.Such is the power of money.Consciously or not, Didi has also taught Eric how to flirt in an intellectually informed way.In his limo, he metaphorically seduces his chief of finance, Jane Melman:"My mood shifts and bends. But when I'm alive and heightened, I'm super-acute. Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a woman who wants to live shamelessly in her body. Tell me this is not the truth. You want to follow your body into idleness and fleshiness. That's why you have to run, to escape the drift of your basic nature. ...What do I see? Something lazy, sexy and insatiable."They "[reach] completion more or less together, touching neither each other nor themselves."When she leaves the limo, Jane tells Eric that she “is a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today."”Catching Eric Off BalanceDespite, possibly because of, this transformation, Didi has noticed doubt creeping into Eric’s worldview."You're beginning to think it's more interesting to doubt than to act. It takes more courage to doubt."When we meet Eric, he has gambled everything on the possibility that the Japanese Yen will fall.He has also just been told that he has an asymmetrical prostate.Without asking or knowing more about the medical significance of his diagnosis, he assumes the worst, that the cancer will soon take his life.Even if it isn’t fatal, his prostate’s asymmetry challenges his idealization of balance.He suffers pain. The pain undermines the foundations of his worldview. He starts to doubt both balance and himself. He starts to realise there is something in life apart from himself. He starts to recognise his own mortality.Jane addresses him in the third person:"He could think and speak of other things but only within the pain. He was living in the gland, in the scalding fact of his biology."Does he love himself or hate himself. I don’t think he knows. Or it changes minute by minute. Or the question is so implicit in everything he does that he can’t get outside it to answer."Eric’s nemesis (who also happens to have an asymmetrical prostate) has worked for him before and has some insight into his personality:"You should have listened to your prostate...You tried to predict movements in the yen by drawing on patterns from nature...You made this form of analysis horribly and sadistically precise. "But you forgot something along the way...The importance of the lopsided, the thing that's skewed a little. You were looking for balance, beautiful balance, equal parts, equal sides..."But you should have been tracking the yen in its tics and quirks. The little quirk. The mis-shape..."That's where the answer was, in your body, in your prostate."Living in the Shadow of a DoubtSo I argue that the purpose of Eric’s journey is to confront his own mortality, to deal with his doubt, not just to get a haircut. Until today, he’s pursued business and wealth as a vehicle for achieving immortality.Vija Kinski, his chief of theory, explains:"Men think about immortality. Never mind what women think. We're too small and real to matter here…Great men historically expected to live forever even as they supervised construction of their monumental tombs on the far bank of the river, the west bank, where the sun goes down."There you sit, of large visions and prideful acts. Why die when you can live on disk? A disk, not a tomb. An idea beyond the body. A mind that's everything you ever were and will be, but never weary or confused or impaired. "It's a mystery to me, how such a thing might happen. Will it happen someday? Sooner than we think because everything happens sooner than we think. Later today perhaps. Maybe today is the day when everything happens, for better or worse, ka-boom, like that."However, having achieved as much as one man could ever achieve in a lifetime, Eric is not interested in trying to create an immortal digital replica of himself.He is interested in his own death, because sooner or later, inevitably, we all have to accept our own mortality:"He was alert, eager for action, for resolution. Something had to happen soon, a dispelling of doubt and the emergence of some design, the subject's plan of action, visible and distinct."Ironically, on the way, Eric embraces the lopsided. When he finally gets his haircut, it is asymmetrical. However, it’s not the end of the journey. He resumes his trip before his haircut is finished. His goal is beyond the haircut. It’s somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen. On the west bank, where the sun goes down.The Threat of DeathEric knows that somewhere on his trip, sometime today, he will die.All along, he has been receiving death threats.His journey across Manhattan is the date of reckoning with his own death, the date when death achieves a balance with life or knocks it off its axis.He equips himself with a gun and abandons his security to deal with his nemesis Benno Levin single-handedly in a dilapidated building in Hell’s Kitchen.By the time he arrives, he’s realised that even business embraces death and destruction:"This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed…Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future...The urge to destroy is a creative urge…The logical extension of business is murder."Death is a natural part of life. He has to endure one last arm wrestle with fate, until he knows that he has died appropriately:"...it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he'd always known would come clear in time. Now he could begin the business of living."He must know and embrace his fate. It does not matter that he might die on the same day. He has already lived life to the fullest:"This was the day, was it not, for influential men to come to sudden messy ends."There is also a sense in which his wealth might come to an end, that his investments will get their own haircut or at the very least, a trim.In his time of dying, the whole of Eric's empire might return, not home, but to nothing.Money might have resumed its narrative drive towards nothingness.Ironically, as the Global Financial Crisis has shown, even billionaires can die with nothing.Frames of Reference“Cosmopolis” is short and easy to read. It occupies a discrete time and space.Rather than being DeLillo-lite or a disappointment, it’s a precisely structured novel that lends itself to being filmed.As with much of DeLillo’s work, it’s concerned with ways of looking and seeing and understanding.If anything, I would call it a highly polished example of "abstracted realism".It is especially informed by Art and Film.Eric finds in Art a pathway into life’s mysteries, one of them being himself:"Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew."To the extent that a painting is one framed work, Film consists of multiple frames.It allows us to explore the situations that we might one day find ourselves in, it creates a frame of reference, it creates frames of reference within which to express ourselves:"I've seen a hundred situations like this. A man and a gun and a locked door. My mother used to take me to the movies.""Cosmopolis" is best construed as a gallery of images or a film.It is highly visual and filmic, even though it's effectively set within the confines of a limo.As Eric passes along 47th Street, he witnesses a gallery of events and images and women and must gaze at and judge and react to them, so that ultimately he can determine his own importance in the true scheme of things.My only concern with respect to the film is how the dialogue will come across.How will it convey the abstracted, conceptual precision of DeLillo's language?Will it sound natural?In My State of GraceThe result of Eric's movie-going is that, when he is confronted by the situation ("a man and a gun and a locked door", but also his mortality, his death), he knows how to deal with it.This comforts him. In his hour of need.While some of his apparent attempts at self-defence are clumsy, they seem to be designed to fail.Ultimately, what really matters is that he submits gracefully to the inevitability of his own death.It is perhaps the most graceful act of his life. And the last day of his life might equally be the most complete.There is something perfect and satisfying in this grace and completeness, even if it's a little perverse, even if it lacks symmetry, even if (unlike Leopold Bloom) Eric fails to return home to his triplex at the end of the day.P.S. Lapse or Claps, Chaps?While I love this novel, there are passages that I recognise will annoy or vindicate those who question DeLillo's talent or consistency.I choose to excuse them or to laugh instead.Here are a few examples for your reading pleasure:"Hoisting his genitals in his hand.""The minute you sat there in that whole tragic regalia of running. That whole sad business of Judeo-Christian jogging.""I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.""Her feet flew out from under her. She uttered a thing, a sound, herself, her soul in rapid rising inflection.""Eric decided to admire this.""The rain was fine. The rain was dramatically right.""The rain had stopped. This was good. This was clearly what it should have done.""It was the last techno-rave, the end of whatever it was the end of.""He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn't realized this could happen to him."Sceptics, laugh with me.Soundtrack:Jimi Hendrix - Crosstown Traffichttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUwjyr...

In the last gasp of youth, Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson is back in Edinburgh. He taps into one last great scam: directing and producing a porn film. To make it work, he needs bedfellows: the lovely Nikki Fuller-Smith, a student with ambition, ego, and troubles to rival his own; old pal Mark Renton; and a motley crew that includes the neighborhood's favorite ex-beverage salesman, "Juice" Terry.In the world of Porno, however, even the cons are conned. Sick Boy and Renton jockey for top dog. The out-of-jail and in-for-revenge Begbie is on the loose. But it's the hapless, drug-addled Spud who may be spreading the most trouble.Porno is a novel about the Trainspotting crew ten years further down the line: still scheming, still scamming, still fighting for the first-class seats as the train careens at high velocity with derailment looming around the next corner.

In Coney Island, Brooklyn, Sarah Goldfarb, a lonely widow, wants nothing more than to lose weight and appear on a television game show. She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend, Marion, and his best friend, Tyrone, have devised an illicit shortcut to wealth and leisure by scoring a pound of uncut heroin. Entranced by the gleaming visions of their futures, these four convince themselves that unexpected setbacks are only temporary. Even as their lives slowly deteriorate around them, they cling to their delusions and become utterly consumed in the spiral of drugs and addiction, refusing to see that they have instead created their own worst nightmares."Selby's place is in the front rank of American novelists. HIs work has the power, the intimacy with suffering and morality, the honesty and moral urgency of Doestoevsky's. To understand Selby's work is to understand the anguish of America." - The New York Times Book Review

A fiercely vivid collection of stories about troubled California teenagers and misfits--violent and harrowing, from the astonishingly talented actor and artist James Franco.Palo Alto is the debut of a surprising and powerful new literary voice. Written with an immediate sense of place--claustrophobic and ominous--James Franco's collection traces the lives of an extended group of teenagers as they experiment with vices of all kinds, struggle with their families and one another, and succumb to self-destructive, often heartless nihilism. In "Lockheed" a young woman's summer--spent working a dull internship--is suddenly upended by a spectacular incident of violence at a house party.  In "American History" a high school freshman attempts to impress a girl during a classroom skit with a realistic portrayal of a slave owner—only to have his feigned bigotry avenged. In "I Could Kill Someone," a lonely teenager buys a gun with the aim of killing his high school tormentor, but begins to wonder about his bully's own inner life. These linked stories, stark, vivid, and disturbing, are a compelling portrait of lives on the rough fringes of youth.

The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone.The vignettes are drawn from Burroughs' own experiences in these places and his addiction to drugs (heroin, morphine, and while in Tangier, majoun [a strong hashish confection] as well as a German opioid, brand name Eukodol, of which he wrote frequently).[source wiki}

With the Christmas season upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson of Edinburgh's finest is gearing up socially—kicking things off with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam.There are some sizable flies in the ointment, though: a missing wife and child, a nagging cocaine habit, some painful below-the-belt eczema, and a string of demanding extramarital affairs. The last thing Robertson needs is a messy, racially fraught murder, even if it means overtime—and the opportunity to clinch the promotion he craves. Then there's that nutritionally demanding (and psychologically acute) intestinal parasite in his gut. Yes, things are going badly for this utterly corrupt tribune of the law, but in an Irvine Welsh novel nothing is ever so bad that it can't get a whole lot worse. . .

Alternate Cover Edition can be found here. Made into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp, The Rum Diary—a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book—is Hunter S. Thompson’s brilliant love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent lust in the Caribbean.Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule and anything (including murder) is permissible. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, this dazzling comedic romp provides a fictional excursion as riveting and outrageous as Thompson’s Fear and Loathing books.

With the publication of Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, Jay McInerney became a literary sensation, heralded as the voice of a generation. The novel follows a young man, living in Manhattan as if he owned it, through nightclubs, fashion shows, editorial offices, and loft parties as he attempts to outstrip mortality and the recurring approach of dawn. With nothing but goodwill, controlled substances, and wit to sustain him in this anti-quest, he runs until he reaches his reckoning point, where he is forced to acknowledge loss and, possibly, to rediscover his better instincts. This remarkable novel of youth and New York remains one of the most beloved, imitated, and iconic novels in America.

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

Ah Bret, I loved you so, so long ago. For anyone who has not had the mixture of pleasure, horror, disgust and loathing which is generated by the reading of American Psycho, then you should probably start here to ease your way into the dismissive, violent and destructive world which Ellis describes. I read American Psycho in one long teenage school day (under desks during class/ behind a wall at break/ on the bus home) and was amazed that this man was actually a fully functioning author and not a psychopathic murderer who, I would happily have believed, penned his most famous of novels from the constraints of a padded room by narrating his tale into a dictophone after he was deemed too dangerous to be given a pen.To compare The Informers to American Psycho is like comparing a watered down lemon cordial to a shot of rocket fuel. The comparison is largely meaningless because American Psycho is so far off the scale of brilliant wrongness that there is no scale capable of measuring it accurately. The brutality, drug taking, narcisism and general self-absorbed-bastarditis exhibited in The Informers is not in the same category but it is still present and grubby. You won't like any of the people who inhabit these pages but that's ok ... maybe they are there to be despised so we can all feel better about ourselves. Thanks Bret, I feel like a paragon of crystalline virtue now.

Bret Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is a writer whose first novel Less Than Zero catapulted him to international stardom while he was still in college. In the years that followed, he found himself adrift in a world of wealth, drugs, and fame, as well as dealing with the unexpected death of his abusive father. After a decade of decadence, a chance for salvation arrives; the chance to reconnect with an actress he was once involved with, and their son. But almost immediately his new life is threatened by a freak sequence of events and a bizarre series of murders that all seem to connect to Ellis’s past. Reality, memoir, and fantasy combine to create not only a fascinating version of this most controversial writer but also a deeply moving novel about love and loss, parents and children, and ultimately forgiveness.

Twenty-five years on from "Less Than Zero", we pick up again with "Clay". In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed with "Less Than Zero", his 'extraordinarily accomplished first novel' ("New Yorker"), successfully chronicling the frightening consequences of unmitigated hedonism within the ranks of the ethically bereft youth of 80s Los Angeles. Now, twenty-five years later, Ellis returns to those same characters: to Clay and the band of infamous teenagers whose lives weave sporadically through his. But now, some years on, they face an even greater period of disaffection: their own middle age. Clay seems to have moved on - he's become a successful screenwriter - but when he returns from New York to Los Angeles, to help cast his new movie, he's soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his former girlfriend, is now married to Trent, and their Beverly Hills parties attract excessive levels of fame and fortune, though for all that Trent is a powerful manager, his baser instincts remain: he's still a bisexual philanderer. Then there's Clay's childhood friend, Julian - who's now a recovering addict - and their old dealer, Rip - face-lifted beyond recognition and seemingly even more sinister than he was in his notorious past. Clay, too, struggles with his own demons after a meeting with a gorgeous actress determined to win a role in his movie. And with his life careening out of control, he's forced to come to terms with the deepest recesses of his character - and with his seemingly endless proclivity for betrayal.

books to ready babyyyy