Interview with Bret Easton Ellis

Over the course of six novels and one book of short stories, Bret Easton Ellis has put together one of the most entertaining, fascinating, and fucked-up bodies of work in contemporary literature.

The release of Less Than Zero (1985) saw Ellis painted by the media—with varying degrees of admiration and disgust—as both an enfant terrible and the voice of his generation. Written in a stark, minimalist style that calmly and blandly relays a story of disaffection and degradation in Los Angeles, the book seems to me to be the ultimate statement on privileged 80s teenhood.

The Rules of Attraction (1987) abandoned Less Than Zero’s spare writing, replacing it with dense, stream-of-consciousness prose in a novel of shifting narration. The disaffectedness was still fully intact, but here it was richer and headier. This book is also the perfect lampoon of the pretension and partying and ridiculousness that happens at liberal-arts colleges.

Read the interview here.