American Psycho Paperback - 2000
by Bret Easton Ellis
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.
First line
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
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 German ed
- Pages 548
- Volumes 1
- Language GER
- Publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Verlag
- Date April 2000
- ISBN 9783462022612 / 346202261X
- Weight 1.04 lbs (0.47 kg)
- Dimensions 7.49 x 4.93 x 1.32 in (19.02 x 12.52 x 3.35 cm)
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Themes
- Cultural Region: Mid-Atlantic
- Demographic Orientation: Urban
- Geographic Orientation: New York
- Dewey Decimal Code FIC
