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Original Essays | October 14, 2009

Emily Pilloton: IMG Will Design for Change...



About six months ago, at a fundraising event for the nonprofit I founded, Project H, a six-year-old girl handed me a pickle jar full of pennies.... Continue »
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11 Burnside Literature- A to Z
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Other titles in the Vintage Contemporaries series:

  1. A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories
  2. A Brief History of the Flood
  3. A Closed Eye
  4. A Cure for Dreams
  5. A Far Country
  6. A Handbook to Luck
  7. A Lesson Before Dying
  8. A Movie...and a Book
  9. A Piece of My Heart
  10. A Special Providence
  11. A Stranger in This World: Stories
  12. A Thing (or Two) about Curtis and Camilla
  13. Abandon
  14. All I Could Get
  15. American Psycho
  16. Anagrams
  17. Angel Rock
  18. Another Green World
  19. Asa, as I Knew Him
  20. Ash Wednesday
  21. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
  22. Babylon and Other Stories
  23. Babylon Rolling
  24. Back in the World: Stories
  25. Bad Behavior
  26. Bailey's Cafe
  27. Bicycle Days
  28. Big Bad Love: Stories
  29. Black Tickets ((Rev)79 Edition)
  30. Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had to
  31. Breaking and entering
  32. Bridge of Sighs
  33. Brief Lives
  34. Bright Lights, Big City
  35. Brightness Falls
  36. Brother, I'm Dying
  37. Buffalo Soldiers
  38. Burning House
  39. Cathedral
  40. Catherine Carmier
  41. Chasing Windmills
  42. Checkpoint
  43. Chilly Scenes of Winter
  44. Claire Marvel
  45. Company
  46. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
  47. Day
  48. Day of the Bees
  49. December
  50. Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera
  51. Delcorso's Gallery
  52. Dirty Work
  53. Distortions
  54. Dogwalker: Stories
  55. Don't Cry
  56. Dr. Haggard's Disease
  57. East of the Mountains
  58. East of the Mountains
  59. Edgewater Angels
  60. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright: A Novel
  61. Empire Falls (HBO Tie-In)
  62. Enchanted Night
  63. Et Tu, Babe
  64. Evening
  65. Falling in Place (80 Edition)
  66. Father's Day
  67. Fidel's Last Days
  68. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories
  69. Fireworks
  70. Five Gates of Hell
  71. Fraud
  72. Friend of My Youth
  73. Gallatin Canyon
  74. Ghost
  75. God's Fool
  76. Goodnight, Nebraska
  77. Gorilla, My Love
  78. Great Neck
  79. Happy All the Time
  80. Henry of Atlantic City
  81. Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
  82. Honeymoon: And Other Stories
  83. House of Sand and Fog
  84. House on Mango Street
  85. How to Breathe Underwater: Stories
  86. In a Country of Mothers
  87. In Lucia's Eyes
  88. In My Father's House
  89. In the Cut
  90. In the Driver's Seat
  91. In the Fall
  92. In Times of Siege
  93. Indelible Acts
  94. Jack
  95. Jamesland (04 Edition)
  96. Jernigan
  97. Keep the Change
  98. Kentucky Straight: Stories
  99. King Bongo: A Novel of Havana
  100. Krik? Krak!
  101. La Casa En Mango Street
  102. Lark and Termite
  103. Last of Menu Girls - With New Introduction ((Rev)04 Edition)
  104. Latecomers
  105. Leaving Home
  106. Lewis Percy
  107. Like Life: Stories
  108. Like You'd Understand, Anyway
  109. Little America
  110. Love Always
  111. Love Among the Ruins
  112. Love in the Present Tense
  113. Lunar Park
  114. Lust and Other Stories
  115. Lying Awake
  116. Mama Day
  117. Matrimony
  118. Meditations from a Movable Chair: Essays
  119. Meditations in Green
  120. Memoirs of a Geisha
  121. Mile Zero
  122. Monkeys
  123. Moons of Jupiter (82 Edition)
  124. Mortimer of the Maghreb: Stories
  125. Mozart and Leadbelly (05 Edition)
  126. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
  127. Netherland
  128. New England White
  129. Ninety-Two in the Shade
  130. Nobody's Angel
  131. Nothing But Blue Skies
  132. Nothing Lost
  133. Of Love and Dust
  134. Off Keck Road: A Novella
  135. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
  136. One To Count Cadence
  137. Our Lady of the Forest
  138. Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
  139. Palace Council
  140. Panama
  141. Paradise
  142. Park City: New and Selected Stories
  143. Particles and Luck
  144. Peace
  145. Philadelphia Fire
  146. Picturing Will
  147. Plainsong
  148. Players
  149. Preston Falls
  150. Prisoners of War
  151. Project X
  152. Providence
  153. Rabbit Boss
  154. Ransom
  155. Ratner's Star
  156. Reservation Road
  157. Reservation Road
  158. Revolutionary Road (Movie Tie-In Edition)
  159. Rocket City
  160. Salmonella Men on Planet Porno
  161. Sam the Cat: And Other Stories
  162. Samedi the Deafness
  163. SAP Rising
  164. Scooter
  165. Secrets and Surprises
  166. Selected Stories
  167. Self-Help
  168. Short Cuts: Selected Stories
  169. Short People
  170. Snow Falling on Cedars
  171. So I Am Glad
  172. Songs without Words
  173. Spider
  174. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories
  175. State of Grace
  176. Still Life with Husband
  177. Story of My Life
  178. Taking Care: Short Stories
  179. The Abomination
  180. The Abortionist's Daughter
  181. The Amalgamation Polka
  182. The Assassin's Song
  183. The Back Nine
  184. The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
  185. The Big Girls
  186. The Bird Is a Raven
  187. The Brief History of the Dead
  188. The Cadence of Grass
  189. The Cage Keeper: And Other Stories
  190. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People
  191. The Clearing
  192. The Clearing
  193. The Closed Circle
  194. The Commitments
  195. The Commoner
  196. The Communist's Daughter
  197. The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind: Stories
  198. The Dead Fish Museum: Stories
  199. The Dive from Clausen's Pier
  200. The Double Bind
  201. The Emperor of Ocean Park: A Novel
  202. The Emperor's Children
  203. The End of California
  204. The Fan Man
  205. The Favorite Game
  206. The Feast of Love
  207. The Feast of Love (Mti)
  208. The Gone-Away World
  209. The Good Life
  210. The Great Divorce
  211. The Grotesque
  212. The Half-Life of Happiness
  213. The House of Sleep
  214. The House on Mango Street
  215. The Hundred Brothers
  216. The Joy Luck Club
  217. The King in the Tree
  218. The King Is Dead
  219. The Last Good Kiss
  220. The Laughing Sutra
  221. The Lay of the Land
  222. The Legal Limit
  223. The Lost City
  224. The Lost Father
  225. The Mezzanine
  226. The Names
  227. The Other
  228. The Outside World
  229. The Practical Heart
  230. The Progress of Love
  231. The Queen's Gambit
  232. The Rain Before It Falls
  233. The Redneck Way of Knowledge
  234. The Revolution of Little Girls
  235. The Rotters' Club
  236. The Sabotage Cafe
  237. The Salt Eaters
  238. The Senator's Wife
  239. The Soul Thief
  240. The Sporting Club
  241. The Tattoo Artist
  242. The Theory of Light and Matter
  243. The Translation of Dr. Apelles: A Love Story
  244. The Ultimate Good Luck
  245. The Uses of Enchantment
  246. The Varieties of Romantic Experience
  247. The View from the Seventh Layer
  248. The Voyage
  249. The Way Through Doors
  250. The Whore's Child: And Other Stories
  251. The Willow Field
  252. The Winemaker's Daughter
  253. The Wrong Case
  254. Things That Fall from the Sky
  255. Through the Ivory Gate
  256. Tietam Brown
  257. To My Dearest Friends
  258. To Skin a Cat
  259. Traffic and Laughter: Ted Mooney
  260. Trans-Sister Radio
  261. Trauma
  262. Trespass (Vintage)
  263. Trouble: Stories
  264. Typical American
  265. Unaccustomed Earth
  266. Undiscovered Gyrl
  267. Veronica
  268. Visible Spirits
  269. Wetware
  270. What Was Mine: & Other Stories
  271. When the World Was Steady
  272. Where I'm Calling from: New and Selected Stories
  273. Whores on the Hill
  274. Wildlife
  275. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Stories
  276. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories: And Other Stories
  277. You Don't Love Me Yet
  278. Young Hearts Crying
  279. Zoology
  280. Zoot-Suit Murders

Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Bret Easton Ellis

Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries) Cover

Staff Pick

Everything that Bret Easton Ellis accomplished with American Psycho has been refined and redesigned in his epic Glamorama. Graphic sex, designer drugs, rock 'n' roll allusions, splatterpunk violence, and characters as deep as 8"x10" glossies — everything you've come to expect from an Ellis novel, this time filtered through the excess and opulence of A-list celebrity culture.
Recommended by Gary, Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

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.

Review:

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

Review:

"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

Review:

"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

Review:

"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

Review:

"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

Review:

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

Review:

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

Review:

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

Review:

"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

Review:

"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

Review:

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

Review:

"An inspired satire." James Patrick Herman, Elle

Review:

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

Review:

"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

Review:

"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)

Review:

"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

Review:

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

Review:

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

Review:

"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

Review:

"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

Review:

"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)

Review:

"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

Synopsis:

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.

Synopsis:

A young man in what is recognizably the fashion- and celebrity-obsessed New York is gradually, imperceptibly drawn into a shadowy looking-glass of that society 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.

About the Author

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.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780375703843
Author:
Ellis, Bret Easton
Publisher:
Vintage Books USA
Location:
New York
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Young men
Subject:
Models
Subject:
Experimental fiction
Subject:
New York
Subject:
Psychological fiction
Edition Description:
Paperback
Series:
Vintage Contemporaries (Paperback)
Series Volume:
digest no. 9
Publication Date:
March 2000
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
560
Dimensions:
7.98x5.22x1.07 in. .97 lbs.

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