Recommendations
Books Like Less Than Zero
Best books to read after Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero is his debut novel — a college student returning to wealthy Los Angeles, observing his friends' emptiness, written when Ellis was nineteen. These recommendations extend the experience through Ellis's other novels and through literary fiction about wealth, youth, and emotional vacancy.
- 1Buy
American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's most celebrated and controversial novel — the same blank affect and designer saturation amplified to grotesque violence on Wall Street; the natural next read after Less Than Zero.
- 2Buy
Imperial Bedrooms
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's direct sequel to Less Than Zero — Clay returns to Los Angeles decades later; best read some time after Less Than Zero to measure how the characters have changed.
- 3Buy
Bright Lights, Big City
by Jay McInerney
The East Coast companion to Less Than Zero — 1980s Manhattan drugs and nightlife, told in the second person; McInerney and Ellis were often paired as the defining writers of their generation.
- 4Buy
Story of a New Name
by Elena Ferrante
Less obviously similar in surface, but sharing Less Than Zero's interest in the way a generation raised in a specific social world cannot find a way out of it — Ferrante's Naples as Ellis's Los Angeles.
- 5Buy
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Five daughters observed by neighborhood boys who cannot understand them — shares Less Than Zero's interest in the gap between surface and interior, and the voyeuristic quality of observing people who are being destroyed by their circumstances.
- 6Buy
Californication
by Jay McInerney
McInerney's novel about a failed writer in Los Angeles — another portrait of the same California milieu Ellis describes, with the same mix of glamour and emptiness.
- 7Buy
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky
The more emotionally available version of Less Than Zero's adolescent alienation — Charlie's passive observation of his peer group is Less Than Zero in a more accessible, feeling register.
- 8Buy
Prozac Nation
by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Wurtzel's memoir of depression as a student at Harvard — the same generation (1980s, wealthy, East Coast), organized around the same question: why doesn't anything feel like enough?
More Less Than Zero Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.