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Ellis Interview

The Morning News has an interview up with Bret by Robert Birnbaum. Robert has chatted with Bret a few times over the past couple of years, so his interview is quite different than most folks because he doesn't have to ask the obvious questions. [Thanks to Tim and Settemod for sending this in]

The only real future project nugget is Bret's response when asked about The Informers:

BEE: And that has a script and looks like it's going to go, yeah.

This would be the Nicholas Jarecki script mentioned last year, so hopefully its still progressing.

Rebels, Turn Out Your Dead

With very little happening in the direct world of Bret Easton Ellis right now, we're reduced to discussing books that Bret blurbs. The latest is Rebels, Turn Out Your Dead from Michael Drinkard - a novel based on true events and set during the Revolutionary War. Here's the blurb from Ellis reprinted at the official site for the book.

"Michael Drinkard is a genius fiction writer who has written a truly original historical saga that envelops us in the madness of Revolutionary War America. He's produced a playful, funny, brisk novel - beautiful yet so spare (there's not a wasted word and no fussy lingering over arcane detail) that Rebels, Turn Out Your Dead never loses its focus as a genuinely rousing adventure told at full gallop with a unique contemporary spirit. I have no idea how Michael Drinkard pulled this off but he transports the reader with the skill of a wizard." - Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis also has a smaller blurb on the back cover of this novel:

Michael Drinkard writes like a benevolent Don DeLillo ... one of our generation's most distinctive and original voices.

Thanks to for bringing this to my attention.

I should also mention that BEE's pal Jay McInerney had a new book released on Jan 31 called, The Good Life. Also, here is an interview discussing the book with WTOP radio.

Deconstructing Ellis

Tiny Mix Tapes tries to review Lunar Park, and ends up with something else entirely

The real undiscovered irony in Bret Easton Ellis' work is that we know that he knows that we know. Case closed. And if you don't know, then it's just tough titties, innit. That's my case, and it's the one thing people never say because Ellis is a "brilliant contradiction." And it's not about beautiful, meaningful writing or character development or even a message. It's all about the environment. Like Bob Dylan said, "Things have changed." On the one hand, Ellis is an experimental writer who attacks the very base of the novel by chucking the narrative out the window. And plot- who needs it? He's going for Truth ‘N Beauty, baby!!! He's writing with his heart, but his heart says it's meaningless, or at least very, very empty.