Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries)

We'll slide down the surface of things . . .

From his first novel — Less Than Zero, published when he was still a college student — to his most recent — the fierce American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis has been a powerful and original presence in contemporary literature, whether giving voice to a previously inchoate generation or provoking a controversy that raged throughout the culture.

Now he takes a quantum leap forward: an awesome reckoning of the American Century at endgame. In Glamorama, a young man in what is recognizably fashion- and celebrity-obsessed Manhattan is gradually, imperceptibly drawn into a shadowy looking-glass of that society, there and in London and Paris, and then finds himself trapped on the other side, in a much darker place where fame and terrorism and family and politics are inextricably linked and sometimes indistinguishable. At once implicated and horror-stricken, his ways of escape blocked at every turn, he ultimately discovers — back on the other, familiar side — that there was no mirror, no escape, no world but this one in which hotels implode and planes fall from the sky.

Time and again, the novel confounds one's expectations of it, and Bret Easton Ellis accomplishes the transitions from comic to surreal to horrific to humane with astonishing confidence. Matching ambition with artistic maturity, Glamorama is at once hilarious, savage in its worldly observation, and compassionate in its vision: a defining novel of our times.

"Ellis is fast becoming a writer of real American genius." GQ

"One of the passing delights of Glamorama is to imagine how scholars of postmodern fiction will explain it a century hence...Ellis invests a fresh hell on every page...[And] through all this mayhem the style remains mysteriously elegant." Alex Ross, The New Yorker

"Hilariously brittle pop-culture references fly by...Ellis' hypnotically perfect prose is able to incorporate just about any convention he puts his mind to." Dennis Cooper, Spin Magazine

"Glamorama is Mr. Ellis at his best and worst. The first 150-odd pages are stunning...the heaps in the last two-thirds cancel the bravura beginning. We're left, natch, with less than zero." Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"What's fresh and arresting in Glamorama, is its uncompromising triviality, its rigorous transience...There's enough high amusement in Glamorama, enough illegitimate literary fun, to more than make up for its tedious tilt toward meaning." Walter Kirn, New York Magazine

"Gets under the skin of our celebrity culture ina way that is both illuminating and frightening." Michael Shelden, Daily Telegraph(London)

"You are invited to the opening of an American masterpiece. RSVP PDQ." Brian Morton, Scotland on Sunday

"A mixture of outrage and farce that connects the jet set to terriorist acts...and which feels strangely authentic." Christopher Lawrence, Bookpage

"Bret Easton Ellis doesn't need the National Lampoon to turn him into a parody ? with Glamorama, he's done it himself." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Clearly, Ellis' authorial vision has grown broader and more inclusive over the past decade....The new novel [provides] Ellis with a vehicle for his strengths, which are essentially reportorial rather than novelistic....[Ellis is] a kind of conceptual artist in print." Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times Book Review

"His best work to date...He remains a laser-precise satirist, but the wit now dominates." Matt Seaton, Esquire

"An inspired satire." James Patrick Herman, Elle

"By far his most ambitious work." Jared Paul Stern, Detour

"Glamorama is the story of a young man in trendy New York who finds himself sucked into a darker, looking-glass version of the city." Library Journal

"An affirmation inside a horror story... A big colleciton of paradoxes: of truth and lies, of beauty and fear, of principle and depravity...A master stylist with hideously interesting new-fangled manners and the heart of an old-fashioned moralist." Andrew Morton, The Observer(London)

"An express-train ride, in my mind, to hell...It does for the cold, minimal 90 what American Psycho did for the Wall Street greed of the 80s. You name it, he manages to get it all in." Andre Leon Talley, Vogue

"Brutally funny...superb...Glamorama courses with energy and intelligence." Bruce Hainley, Bookforum

"Ellis' novel of high-society lowlifes adds up to much, much less than Zero." Kyle Smith, People Magazine

"A comic and frightening story...A plotline that arcs and undulates...The pleasures of a celebrity-worshipping narrative overlaying a violent, chilling and, in the style of Ballard, instructive plot." Adam Mazmanian, Newsday

"His impeccable portrait of high-living mannequins exudes a glamour...cold and pitiless and modern....He captures a cultural moment of radical dandyhood, when distinctions of sexuality seem less important than whether you look like a model and wear Prada." Rhonda Lieberman, Village Voice

"Slowly and ominously, a new voice emerges from Ellis: This is a political thriller bursting with conspiracies, double agents and international terrorists...Compelling and scary while managing at the same time to take our peculiar obsession with celebrity and literally blow it to pieces. A bonfire of the vanities? Glamorama is more like a Semtex attack on our superficialities." Simmy Richmond, The Face(London)

"The plot is nihilistic; the characters, depraved. And page after page is filled with horrible, graphic violence. So why do I get the feeling Ellis is a closet conservative?....[It is perhaps] a conservative novel — though one so steeped in liberal pop culture that it's easy to miss the point." James Panero, National Review

The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world.  In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially.

Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs who exists in magazines and gossip columns and whose life resembles an ultra-hip movie, is living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another.  And then it's time to move on to the next stage.  But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.

The center of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. He's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another, on the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history. And now it's time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.<P>With the same deft satire and savage wit he has brought to his previous fiction, Bret Easton Ellis shows beyond the facade and introduces us, unsparingly, to what we always feared was behind it. Glamorama shows us a shadowy looking-glass world, the juncture where fame and fashion and terror and mayhem meet and then begin to resemble the familiar surface of our lives.

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of Less Than Zero; The Rules of Attraction; The Informers, a collection of stories; and American Psycho, all of which are available in Vintage paperback. He lives in New York City.