The Informers - Softcover

Bret Easton Ellis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330339184 ISBN 13: 9780330339186

Publisher: Picador, 1995

Synopsis

Set in Los Angeles, in the recent past. The birthplace and graveyard of American myths and dreams, the city harbours a group of people trapped between the beauty of their surroundings and their own moral impoverishment. This novel is a chronicle of their voices.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer [and] American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel...Written out of the American tradition -- the novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly...A seminal book."

-- Fay Weldon, Washington Post

"What's rarely said in all the furor over this novel is that it's a satire, a hilarious, repulsive, boring, seductive, deadpan satire...Ellis is, first and last, a moralist. Under cover of his laconic voice, every word in his three novels to date springs from grieving outrage at our spiritual condition... Ambition alone sets it apart from most contemporary fiction. Prudes, squares and feminist commissars aside, the rest of us should applaud Brat Easton Ellis for setting out in this noble and dangerous direction."

-- Henry Bean, front page, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious ambitious, inspiring piece of writing, which has large elements of Jane Austen at her vitriolic best. An important book."

-- Katherine Dunn

"A great novel. What Emerson said about genius, that it's the return of one's rejected thoughts with an alienated majesty, holds true for American Psycho...There is a fever to the life of this book that is, in my reading, unknown in American literature."

-- Michael Tolkin

"The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes...[Ellis] is showing older authors where the hands have come to on the clock...He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that anymore."

-- Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair

From the Inside Flap

Los Angeles, in the very recent past. The birthplace and graveyard of American myths and dreams, it harbors a group of people trapped between the sybaritic beauty of their surroundings and their own damning moral impoverishment. The Informers is a chronicle of their voices -- fused into an intense, impressionistic narrative that spans and blurs genders, generations and even identities -- all of them suffering from nothing less than the death of the soul.

Each of the characters in this extraordinary book describes connections between people (classmates and best friends, sometimes dead; a decrepit rock star and his retinue; estranged or ex-husbands and wives, as well as their current, often improbable partners; sex dates and vampires) who remain in every important way strangers. A father inveigles his distant son into a holiday jaunt to Hawaii ... a car crashes in the desert, a plane goes down in the mountains ... a girl returns home to her future by cross-country train, while another spend

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330339184
• ISBN 13: 9780330339186
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240