White

Bret Easton Ellis has wrestled with the double-edged sword of fame and notoriety for more than thirty years now, since Less Than Zero catapulted him into the limelight in 1985, earning him devoted fans and, perhaps, even fiercer enemies. An enigmatic figure who has always gone against the grain and refused categorization, he captured the depravity of the eighties with one of contemporary literature's most polarising characters, American Psycho's iconic, terrifying Patrick Bateman, and received plentiful death threats in the bargain. In recent years, his candor and gallows humor on both Twitter and his podcast have continued his legacy as someone determined to speak the truth, however painful it might be, and whom people accordingly either love or love to hate. He encounters various positions and voices controversial opinions, more often than not fighting the status quo. Now, in White, with the same originality displayed in his fiction, Ellis pours himself out onto the page and, in doing so, eviscerates the perceived good that the social-media age has wrought, starting with the dangerous cult of likeability. White is both a denunciation of censorship, particularly the self-inflicted sort committed in hopes of being 'accepted', and a bracing view of a life devoted to authenticity. In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis captured and skewered the zeitgeist of a generation. Now that same, mercurial mind takes a long look at the now and finds much of it broken. In his first work of non-fiction, Ellis mercilessly takes on the cultural tropes that so fill our phones and minds and calls their bluff: funny, acerbic, White is an important and daring mirror to our dangerous vanity.