Picador to publish Bret Easton Ellis’s first non-fiction book

Combining memoir, incisive cultural commentary and some fearless and forthright views about what the hell is going on in the world right now, Bret Easton Ellis’s first work of non-fiction is both an incendiary polemic about this young century’s failings and a behind-the-scenes look at the life of one of the world’s most infamous writers. Passionate, irreverent and frequently hilarious, this freewheeling book is a blast of fresh air in a time of stale and stifled conversation.

White is Ellis’s first new book since 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms; UK and Commonwealth rights were acquired by Paul Baggaley and Kris Doyle from Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown (on behalf of Amanda Urban at ICM). Picador, the only publisher to have published Ellis’s work continuously from the beginning of his career, will publish White in hardback on 2 May 2019 and Ellis will visit the UK as part of a major publicity campaign.

Since Less Than Zero catapulted Bret Easton Ellis into the limelight in 1985, earning him devoted fans – and perhaps even fiercer enemies – he has been 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 polarizing characters, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, and received plentiful death threats into the bargain. In recent years, his candour and gallows humour 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. In White, Ellis puts himself and his opinions on the page: eviscerating the perceived good of the social-media age, the cult of likeability and the reputation economy; denouncing censorship and defending freedom of speech; and explaining how growing up as a nihilistic Gen Xer made him who he is today.

Kris Doyle said, ‘Bret pulls no punches, no subject is off limits: his teen crush on Richard Gere, the truth about Patrick Bateman, why Moonlight shouldn’t have won the Oscar, that Twitter storm about Kathryn Bigelow – it’s all here! White is everything Bret’s fans could hope for. But because he’s always understood the zeitgeist better than anyone else, I know this book will get everybody talking and win him lots of new readers too. One thing’s for sure: this publication will be impossible to ignore.’