Reading Bret Easton Ellis Short Stories: A Practical Guide
Bret Easton Ellis is primarily known for his novels, but his short fiction collection Slaves of New York (originally published in 1986) is where many readers first encounter his style. The book contains several interconnected short stories that later evolved into scenes for his novel Lunar Park and other works. If you're looking to find and read these stories, here's what actually works. The main collection is Slaves of New York, which includes stories like "The Rules of Attraction," "Mildred Beatrice," and "Bully." There's also a later collection called The Rules of Attraction (2009) that pairs the novella with other shorter fiction. Amazon carries both editions in paperback and Kindle formats. Barnes & Noble has them too. Bookshop.org sometimes has them in stock when the big retailers sell out, which happens occasionally between reprints. I ran into a specific problem when trying to track down some of his earlier magazine-published shorts like "Imaginary Friends" and "The Big Machine." These appeared in publications like Esquire and Vanity Fair in the 1990s and early 2000s, and they don't appear in any single collection. The workaround I found was searching StorySouth's online archives and the Paris Review issue database. Ellis has also published occasional new short fiction in McSweeney's and the New York Times Magazine. A lot of fans compile these in scattered Google Drive folders, but those links die constantly. I keep a personal archive of working links, but sharing it publicly feels wrong since some of these stories are under copyright.
There's a genuine downside to relying on secondary sources. A lot of Ellis short fiction isn't available legally through free channels, and the PDFs circulating on forums often have corrupted text or missing pages from poor OCR scans. If you're trying to study his prose structure, that's annoying. The most practical approach is buying the proper editions even if it costs $15 to $25 total across the two main collections. That's significantly cheaper than spending hours hunting for broken download links. One thing beginners miss about reading Ellis's short fiction is how much of it was revised heavily before appearing in book form. The stories in Slaves of New York as published differ substantially from their original magazine versions in some cases. If you're comparing editions for academic purposes, you need to note which version you're reading because the narrative voice shifts noticeably between early and late drafts. I learned this the hard way after citing a passage in a film studies paper, only to have my professor point out that the quote I used didn't match the published book version I'd been referencing. Ellis's short stories operate differently than his novels. The compression requirement forces him to strip away the detailed lifestyle cataloguing that defines American Psycho and Less Than Zero. What remains is often more emotionally direct, sometimes uncomfortably so. The stories tend to end abruptly without resolution, which reads as a deliberate stylistic choice but can frustrate readers expecting narrative closure. There's no remedy for that except accepting it as part of his approach.
If you want to skip the physical books entirely, Slaves of New York is available through Kindle Unlimited in some regions, though availability changes based on your location. Audiobook versions exist for select titles through Audible, but they're not comprehensive across all the short fiction. The prose works best read at normal pace rather than narrated, since Ellis deliberately writes with a flat affect that narration tends to over-dramatize.
Get the Full Details
