Word: bret
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...known as the most expensive school in the country, the rural refuge for rich flakes. But these days, the Vermont college also seems to be the place to go if you want to graduate a published writer. Just two years ago, while he was still a Bennington junior, Bret Easton Ellis hit the bestseller list with Less Than Zero, an up-in-coke account of Los Angeles life. The book was recently followed by The Rules of Attraction, a bright-lights-big-campus story about life at a small liberal arts school...
...yuppie market, hot new writers like Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis are packaged and hyped as fashionable commodities...
...adopting the flummery of mass marketing. But rising costs, corporate takeovers and the short shelf life of new titles at the book chains have accelerated the conversion of authors into fashionable commodities. This is especially true for writers who can be plugged into the latest trends. Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Jill Eisenstadt and other young novelists who currently rouse the bid-lust of Manhattan publishers were raised on pseudo events. Particularly flamboyant evidence of this can be seen in the self-promotions of their colleague Tama Janowitz, author of Slaves of New York...
...Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero, a timely bit of voyeurism about the sordid lives of rich Los Angeles youth. As the title suggests, the characters are intellectual and emotional ciphers. Ellis' documentary intentions are clear, but his laconic descriptions of numb fornications, pharmacological excesses and teenage nihilism come dangerously close to violating Mark Twain's third rule of writing: "That the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others...
...alone. Now even that consolation seems pointless. Six months after her miscarriage, which has driven Rick into self-absorbed guilt and silence, Paige has moved out. The question of whether this marriage can or should be saved generates some suspense. More interesting, though, are the paces Author Bret Lott puts his hero through during the ordeal of wifelessness. Living without Paige and most of the furniture, which she took with her, Rick fills up his empty days by becoming a demon salesman. He is so good that he attracts the attention of his bosses. Yet he realizes that even with...