Books like Imperial Bedrooms
Twenty-five years after Less Than Zero, Clay, now a screenwriter, returns to Los Angeles to cast a film and finds the same people, older, richer and emptier, still circling the same moral void.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Imperial Bedrooms
Less Than Zero
A college student returns to 1980s Los Angeles and drifts through a world of cocaine, parties, and moral emptiness.
The Informers
Linked stories of rich, numbed Los Angeles in the early 1980s, in which students, parents, studio executives, a rock star and a pair of vampires drift through cocaine, sunshine and emotional vacancy.
Play It as It Lays
Maria Wyeth, a fading actress in late-1960s Los Angeles, drives the freeways all day to keep from thinking about her marriage, her institutionalised daughter and what she cannot make herself feel.
The Day of the Locust
Tod Hackett, a young set designer at a Hollywood studio in the 1930s, falls for a would-be starlet and watches the bored, disappointed people who came to California to die turn ugly.
The Black Dahlia
In 1947 Los Angeles, two police detectives and former boxers are drawn into the case of Elizabeth Short, a young woman found murdered and mutilated in a vacant lot, and the obsession it breeds pulls them into the city's dark heart.
The Big Sleep
A private detective in 1930s Los Angeles takes a missing-person case that leads through a web of pornography, murder, and the corruption of the California rich.
I Have the Right to Destroy Myself
A man who helps strangers end their lives narrates the stories of the clients and lovers he has known in a cool, cinematic novel of 1990s Seoul.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
A gang of boys worship a sailor for embodying the heroic ideal, but when the sailor softens into domesticity, they decide he must be punished.
The Book of Illusions
A man watches a silent film and becomes obsessed with the actor, whose disappearance fifty years ago may hold the key to his own unraveling life.
Red Harvest
A detective arrives in a mining town controlled by warring gangs and plays them against each other, leaving a trail of bodies that adds up to something like justice.
Devil in a Blue Dress
In Los Angeles in 1948, Easy Rawlins, a Black war veteran just fired from his job at an aircraft plant, is hired to find a white woman named Daphne Monet.
Half His Age
Waldo, a seventeen-year-old in Anchorage, Alaska, who lives with her mother in a cramped apartment, develops an obsessive crush on her married creative writing teacher after a breakup, and sets out to pursue him.