White

Bret Easton Ellis

Apr 2019 · Sold by Vintage

About this eBook

Own it, snowflakes: you've lost everything you claim to hold dear.

White is Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction. Already the bad boy of American literature, from Less Than Zero to American Psycho, Ellis has also earned the wrath of right-thinking people everywhere with his provocations on social media, and here he escalates his admonishment of received truths as expressed by today's version of "the left." Eschewing convention, he embraces views that will make many in literary and media communities cringe, as he takes aim at the relentless anti-Trump fixation, coastal elites, corporate censorship, Hollywood, identity politics, Generation Wuss, "woke" cultural watchdogs, the obfuscation of ideals once both cherished and clear, and the fugue state of American democracy. In a young century marked by hysterical correctness and obsessive fervency on both sides of an aisle that's taken on the scale of the Grand Canyon, White is a clarion call for freedom of speech and artistic freedom.

"The central tension in Ellis's art—or his life, for that matter—is that while [his] aesthetic is the cool reserve of his native California, detachment over ideology, he can't stop generating heat.... He's hard-wired to break furniture."—Karen Heller, The Washington Post

"Sweating with rage . . . humming with paranoia."—Anna Leszkiewicz, The Guardian

"Snowflakes on both coasts in withdrawal from Rachel Maddow's nightly Kremlinology lesson can purchase a whole book to inspire paroxysms of rage . . . a veritable thirst trap for the easily microaggressed. It's all here. Rants about Trump derangement syndrome; MSNBC; #MeToo; safe spaces."—Bari Weiss, The New York Times

Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

Ratings and reviews

I put it down about 90 pages in. I loved American Psycho and enjoyed Less than Zero, but the things I liked about those weren't in this. I was expecting an interesting perspective on the current state of media and pop culture but the 90 pages I read were more just Bret's personal anecdotes. It might be an interesting read for someone who is into the 80s-90s Hollywood rich kid scene, but that not is not me. It's also possible that I put it down before it got good.

This book is really incredible. Although Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction and American Psycho were really similar in tone, Bret has somehow collated a bunch of nonfiction essays together that read exactly the same, but with one difference: there is only one recurring character who is a sad nihilistic yuppie in the whole thing. Ellis goes to great lengths to describe various anecdotes of hysterics that are indicative of millennials being intellectual cowards, failing to note that most of his anecdotes are about people his age. It's almost as though all his books are really just bitchy exposés into mild dramas he experienced in his somewhat privileged upbringing. He compares his Twitter to "dada performance art" but perhaps his greatest performance is pretending he's not just passive nihilistic homosexual Clay, or cool-headed homosexual Paul Denton, or secretly violently angry closeted homosexual Patrick Bateman. It's not a convincing performance, but great nonetheless.

About the author

BRET EASTON ELLIS is the author of six novels and a collection of stories, which have been translated into thirty-two languages. He lives in Los Angeles and is the host of The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast available on Patreon.