Less Than Zero

‘Unstoppable . . .

The impeccable timing captures the banalities of Clay’s life in a way that both disgusts me and breaks my heart’ – Ottessa Moshfegh, author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and LapvonaIn 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed the world with his debut novel, Less Than Zero. This 40th anniversary edition of the cult classic novel contains an introduction by Rachel Kushner, the Booker Prize-nominated author of Creation Lake and The Mars Room. 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. With its relentless scenes of grotesque brutality, Less Than Zero is an unflinching portrait of a lost generation in revolt.

Published when he was just twenty-one, Less Than Zero 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. ‘The simplicity of the prose, the precision of his imagery, and the atmosphere of menace and cultural oblivion are invigorating . . . one of the most telling and striking chroniclers of the void beneath our consumerist society’ – The Guardian‘Deadly serious social satires masquerading as generic pulp workouts . . . artifacts that can rearrange your chemistry and make you see the world anew’ – Esquire‘An extremely traditional and very serious American novelist. He is the model of literary filial piety, counting among his parents Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, and Joan Didion’ – The Washington Post