American Psycho Paperback - 1991
by Bret Easton Ellis
Vintage is rushing to put out the controversial book that everyone's talking about--especially after Simon & Schuster decided at the last minute not to publish it. Described by Publishers Weekly as "a grisly, gritty gross-out (about) the cool yuppie lifestyle of Patrick Bateman, 26, whose avocation is torturing and dismembering his female victims and festooning his apartment with their body parts", this new book by the author of Less Than Zero is sure to cause a stir.
About this book
American Psycho is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis that follows the life of Patrick Bateman, a wealthy and successful investment banker in New York City during the late 1980s. As Bateman navigates his professional and social life, he also harbors a secret life as a sadistic serial killer. The novel is a commentary on the emptiness and depravity of the materialistic culture of the time and the alienation and disconnection that can result from it. The graphic and disturbing descriptions of Bateman's violent acts serve to highlight the depths of his psychological disturbance and the true horror of his actions.
A film adaptation was released in 2000 starring Christian Bale with Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon in supporting roles.
Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho is one of the most controversial and talked-about novels of all time. Ellis received 13 death threats before the novel was even published. It was named the 53rd most banned and challenged book from 1990-1999 by the American Library Association.
Summary
From the jacket flap
Now a major motion picture from Lion's Gate Films starring Christian Bale (Metroland), Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto (My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoon (Cruel Intentions), and directed by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol).
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
First Edition Identification
The first American Psycho edition was published in 1991 (Vintage Contemporaries, New York). The original price was $15 US. Vintage Books purchased the rights to the novel after Simon & Schuster withdrew from the project because of "aesthetic differences over what critics had termed its violent and women-hating content." American Psycho was not published in hardcover in the United States until 2012 when a limited hardcover edition was published by Centipede Press.
Details
- Title American Psycho
- Author Bret Easton Ellis
- Binding Paperback
- Edition 1st
- Pages 416
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Vintage, New York, New York, U.s.a.
- Date 1991-03-06
- ISBN 9780679735779 / 0679735771
- Weight 0.7 lbs (0.32 kg)
- Dimensions 8.04 x 5.3 x 0.9 in (20.42 x 13.46 x 2.29 cm)
-
Themes
- Chronological Period: 1980's
- Chronological Period: 1950-1999
- Cultural Region: Mid-Atlantic
- Cultural Region: Northeast U.S.
- Demographic Orientation: Urban
- Geographic Orientation: New York
- Library of Congress subjects Psychological fiction, Serial murderers
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 90010247
- Dewey Decimal Code FIC
Media reviews
Citations
- Library Journal, 01/01/1991, Page 0
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