The Rules of Attraction (1985) is another novel written by Bret Easton Ellis. This is his second novel and concerns a love triangle among three students at an East Coast college.

James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is considered to be the greatest bildungsroman in the English language. In this story, Stephen Daedalus is completing his studies at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, but is distracted by aesthetic questions and the temptations of the flesh.

Ellis's controversial novel, American Psycho (1991), has been recently made into a popular movie of the same name. It chronicles the activities of a psychotic serial killer inManhattan and is set in the early 1980s.

Lisa Alther's 1976 bestseller, Kinflicks, chronicles the story of a young woman who discovers the joys of liberation and sexual experimentation in the 1960s.

The Catcher in the...