Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis

Jun 2010 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The timeless classic from the acclaimed author of American Psycho about the lost generation of 1980s Los Angeles who experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. • The basis for the cult-classic film "Possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." —The New York Times
They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he 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.

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

Ratings and reviews

The first novel of Bret Easton Ellis I read, I absolutely loved it. Reading it was like taking a time machine back to my favorite decade the 80s. The book has almost a haunting or eerie feel to it from the crazy late night drug fueled parties, all the characters seeming ambivalence to all the awful crazy things going on around them, & seeing their friends in scary messed up situations which they never intervene in or help their friends. They just watch with a cool detachment. "Disappear Here" the term on the billboard Clay sees or thinks about throughout the novel would be a great descriptive term for this novel. A definite page Turner you won't want to put down, and it is one of my favorite books ever. Check out Brett's other novels The Informers, Rules of Attraction and it's sequel Glamorama you'll love them if you liked Less Than Zero.

Yes its sad and empty. That's the point. Bret Easton Ellis takes you deep into this world of rich kids with jacked up issues. But it's the way he expresses the characters through his writing that makes this book one of the best of all time. He defined a whole generation. First time I read this book I finished it in one sitting.

This book is really just a long drawn out summer for a 19 year old coming back home to LA between freshman and sophomore year of college in New Hampshire.

About the author

BRET EASTON ELLIS is the author of five novels, including Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms, and a collection of stories, The Informers. His works have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and The Informers have all been made into films. He lives in Los Angeles.