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Bret Easton Ellis

Books

17 Things We Learned From Bret Easton Ellis’s Reddit AMA

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday afternoon, famed novelist, screenwriter, and Twitter terrorist Bret Easton Ellis graced Reddit with his presence for an AMA (that’s Ask Me Anything, for the uninitiated). Unsurprisingly, it was full of cheeky questions, blunt answers, and insights into the mind of Patrick Bateman. Surprisingly, there was not much in the way of ranting about GLAAD. Check out the most interesting tidbits after the jump, and sound off on them in the comments. … Read More

Media

What Bret Easton Ellis’ GLAAD Rant Gets Right (And What It Gets Wrong)

By Tyler Coates on

Out has published a long rant from novelist and occasional Internet provocateur Bret Easton Ellis that covers at length the following subjects: Jason Collins, the former NBA player who came out as gay two weeks ago with a controversial Sports Illustrated cover story, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the organization’s annual media awards, openly gay actor Matt Bomer, a defense of AIDS jokes, and the phenomenon he calls “the Gay Man as the Magical Elf.” Strap in folks, because there’s a lot to parse in this nearly 3,500-word screed in which Ellis places himself at the heart of a great debate about the nature of today’s gay man — a topic on which the writer seems to play both sides. … Read More

Books

Required Reading List: Jay Gatsby

By Emily Temple on

With Baz Luhrmann’s splashy adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel contender hitting theaters Friday, Flavorwire is devoting this week to all things Great Gatsby. Click here to follow our coverage.

“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously quipped, “even so, they have made me.” In this bi-weekly series, Flavorwire plays professor to some of our favorite pop culture characters, assigning reading lists tailored to their temperaments or — in some cases — designed to make them into slightly better people. After all, even fictional characters can have their lives changed by books. Or so we imagine. This week, we recommend a reading list for the man of the moment, one Jay Gatsby. … Read More

Books

A Partial List of Things That Could Pop Up in Bret Easton Ellis’s New Novel

By Emily Temple on

In early December, Bret Easton Ellis tweeted, “FYI: There. Is. No. New. Novel. Being. Written. Except for maybe The James Deen Story and something called ‘Come Over At Do Bring Coke Now.’” But now, he admits that there just may be, writing that ”It started with an image revolving around the blood-red Emser tile sign situated on a rooftop at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Holloway Drive: the view from behind the windshield, an accident, the mystery unfolding, something about the past, about that last year in high school, intimations of a murder disguised as a suicide.” These days, Ellis is probably at least as well known for his combative, sometimes apparently drug-addled Twitter feed as he is for his novels, so we decided to turn there to fuel our wild speculations about what themes a new novel from the writer might contain. Whether it’s The James Deen Story or Come Over At Do Bring Coke Now, here are a few things BEE has been obsessing over on Twitter in recent months — and might well find their way into the novel. … Read More

Books

15 Movie Tie-In Book Covers That Make Us Sad

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday, we spotted the cover for Scribner’s upcoming republication of The Great Gatsby, in concert with the film adaptation’s May release. The Great Gatsby is one of those books with a cover so iconic that any change to it offends our delicate sensibilities, but even with that self-awareness, the image got us thinking about other movie (and TV) tie-in editions of books, and how truly awful — not to mention unfaithful to the original text — they can be. That said, there’s no denying that movie tie-in editions sell books, so we guess there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We just wish there were another way. … Read More

Celebrity

10 of the Most Incredibly Unlikely Celebrity Feuds in History

By Alison Herman on

Yesterday saw the latest flare-up in what’s apparently a nearly two-decade war between Roseanne Barr and writer Jamaica Kincaid. As Roseanne tells it, Kincaid resigned in protest when then-editor-in-chief Tina Brown invited Barr to guest-edit an issue of the New Yorker in 1996, which is why Barr now considers Kincaid a “repugnant classist.” We didn’t know the two women had even heard of each other, let alone hated each other, but it turns out plenty of famous people have beef, and not just Kanye and Taylor Swift. Here are some of the most unexpected celebrity conflicts, from authors to actors to everything in between. … Read More

Pop Culture

Bret Easton Ellis' Worst Tweets of 2012

By Emily Temple on

It’s year’s end, which means we’re doing a lot of roundups of our cultural touchstones from 2012. But not all roundups have to be of the things we liked, right? Enter American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, whose Twitter feed, as much as we hate to admit it, definitely ranked on our cultural radar this year. To be honest, a lot of what he says is truly hilarious, he recommends good books (he’s been on about Skippy Dies recently, which we also loved), and we actually find his insistence that Magic Mike was the best movie of 2012 kind of refreshing. But at this point, he’s much more famous for the pretty awful things he says than he is for the clever ones. And he can be an enormous jerk. Remember when he said bullying victims should “man up“? Or how about the time he compared watching Glee to stepping into a puddle of HIV? Or the time he celebrated J.D. Salinger’s death? Well, he’s only stepped up his game this year. After the jump, we present BEE’s most offensive, most left-field, and flat-out worst tweets of 2012. Feel free to argue with us in the comments. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. Famed architect Oscar Niemeyer, the man behind many of the buildings in Brazil’s futuristic capital, has died at the age of 104. [via Guardian]

2. It turns out Taylor Swift as just as good at beatboxing as you might imagine. [via Gawker] … Read More

Books

Authors’ Funniest Responses to the Film Adaptations of Their Work

By Emily Temple on

Novels have always been fodder for filmmakers, but it seems as though the adaptation pace has been amped up in recent years (and even in recent months), with Hollywood churning out versions of every beloved book, whether it’s actually unfilmable or no. But what do the authors have to say about all this? Of course, it depends both on the author and on the adaptation. After the jump, we’ve collected a few of their funniest responses to the film adaptations of their work, or even just the prospect of said adaptation, whether wry, resigned, angry or goofily psyched. Click through, and add to our collection in the comments! … Read More

Books

The Seven Deadly Sins in Literature

By Emily Temple on

Today marks the release of Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, a portrait of a woman obsessed with food and the efforts (or non-efforts) of her family to get her eating under control. We can say pretty confidently that the book made us never want to overeat again, and we got to thinking about the other books that make us want to give up our vices. After all, any sin you can dream up has probably been written about, usually by someone French. After the jump, find examples of the seven deadly sins in literature (whether actually deadly or just unfortunate). Indulge in a little naughtiness-by-proxy, and then let us know which sinful characters we missed in the comments. … Read More