Meet the Author returns to FLAD on October 31st with the author of the iconic bestseller American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis. The Shards, his first work of fiction in more than a decade, will be published in Portugal this month by LeYa/ASA.

Controversial, polarizing, and genius, Bret Easton Ellis is something of a prince of darkness in American literature, and, above all, himself – a provocateur. Author of thirteen books, several of them adapted for the cinema, he is best known for the iconic American Psycho, a work banned in several countries and would cost him his contract with Simon & Schuster.

American Psycho would become a cult work – a kind of black comedy and satire of Ronald Reagan’s America and a postmodern critique of capitalist society’s culture of consumerism – after hitting the big screen in 2000, with Christian Bale in the lead role of the yuppie serial killer in his spare time.
Bret Easton Ellis now presents The Shards, his first novel since 2013, which will be published this month by LeYa/ASA. This, according to him, is the work he wanted to write – and that tormented him – for two decades. A kind of memory about what happened to you and your friends in your last year of high school, and that the last time you tried to write it, you ended up in a hospital with a severe anxiety attack.

The conversation with Bret Easton Ellis will take place on October 31, at 6:30 p.m., in the FLAD auditorium, at Rua do Sacramento à Lapa, 21 – Lisbon.

The session is open to the public and admission is free. If you would like to watch, please email fladport@flad.pt.

Synopsis: The Shards – LeYa/ASA, 2023

LOS ANGELES, 1981. Buckley College is on fire.

Bret is 17 years old and a senior in high school when his path crosses with that of a new student with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is attractive, charismatic, and hides a secret. Bret’s obsession with him is matched only by his uneasiness with the Dragnet, a serial killer who seems to be closing in on his group of friends, taunting them with grotesque threats and chilling acts of violence.

The coincidences that follow are strange indeed, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager, whose gift for constructing narratives is about to make him a literary sensation.

Can Bret trust his friends – or his own mind – to understand the danger they may be in?

Set against the vivid and nostalgic backdrop of L.A. in the pre-Less Than Zero era, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusion of fact and fiction that brilliantly explores Bret’s emotional life at age 17 – sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.