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Less Than Zero

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Less Than Zero

Written by: Bret Easton Ellis
Narrated by: Christian Rummel
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Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money – a place devoid of feeling or hope.

Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs, and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Bret Easton Ellis' book, you'll also get an exclusive Jim Atlas interview that begins when the audiobook ends.

©1985 Bret Easton Ellis (P)2009 Audible, Inc. Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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What the critics say

" Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation." ( USA Today)
"A killer - sexy, sassy, and sad.... It's a teenage slice-of-death novel, no holds barred." ( Village Voice)
"One of the most disturbing novels I've read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." ( The New York Times)
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I keep returning to this first book of Bret Easton Ellis. There is nothing subtle about the content. The subtlety lies in the repressed cries for help coming from a narrator-protagonist who does not know what he needs and does not know where to look. This book manages to explore this without the narrator really understanding it himself. There is no bildungsroman. There is no learning. The book ends as lost as it begins. It's a work of art.

Vacuous alienation

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