The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard - Hardcover

Ballard, J. G.; Amis, Martin

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9780393072624: The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393072622 ISBN 13: 9780393072624

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

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“More than one thousand compelling pages from one of the most haunting, cogent, and individual imaginations in contemporary literature.”—William Boyd The American publication of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard is a landmark event. Increasingly recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic novelists, J. G. Ballard was a “writer of enormous inventive powers,” who, in the words of Malcolm Bradbury, possessed, “like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of imagination.”

Best known for his novels, such as Empire of the Sun and Crash, Ballard rose to fame as the “ideal chronicler of disturbed modernity” (The Observer). Perhaps less known, though equally brilliant, were his devastatingly original short stories, which span nearly fifty years and reveal an unparalleled prescience so unique that a new word—Ballardian—had to be invented. Ballard, who wrote that “short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available,” regretted the fact that the public had increasingly lost its ability to appreciate them.

With 98 pulse-quickening stories, this volume helps restore the very art form that Ballard feared was comatose. Ballard’s inimitable style was already present in his early stories, most of them published in science fiction magazines. These stories are surreal, richly atmospheric and splendidly elliptical, featuring an assortment of psychotropic houses, time-traveling assassins, and cities without clocks. Over the next fifty years, his fierce imaginative energy propelled him to explore new topics, including the dehumanization of technology, the brutality of the corporation, and nuclear Armageddon. Depicting the human soul as “being enervated and corrupted by the modern world” (New York Times), Ballard began to examine themes like overpopulation, as in “Billenium,” a claustrophobic imagining of a world of 20 billion people crammed into four-square-meter rooms, or the false realities of modern media, as in the classic “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” a faux-psychological study of the sexual and violent reactions elicited by viewing Reagan’s face on television, in which Ballard predicted the unholy fusion of pop culture and sound-bite politics thirteen years before Reagan became president. Given Ballard’s heightened powers of perception, it is astonishing that the dehumanized world that he apprehended so acutely neither diminished his own febrile imagination nor his engagement with mankind, evident in every story, including two new ones for this American edition.

So eerily prophetic is his vision, so commanding are his literary gifts, the import and insight of J. G. Ballard’s deeply humanistic and transcendent works can only grow in years to come.

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Review:

Although Ballard, who died in April, was probably more influential than he was popular, during his lifetime he received the ultimate literary honorific: the use of his name in adjectival form. Perhaps best known for his books that became movies...he was a prolific and provocative short-story writer, too....An essential work from an essential writer.--Keir Graff

The marvel of most of these tales is how instantly comprehensible their alternate realities are when so little is explained--and how believable they are, too, thanks to Ballard's unflappable narrative voice. With unerring instinct, he finds the ordinariness in the most preposterous scenarios, thus connecting them in detail and tone to our own reality....There are still two Ballard novels and a memoir awaiting U.S. publication. Let's hope the overdue appearance of this volume means the rest are on their way.--Michael Upchurch

Each of Ballard's 98 short stories is like a dream more perfectly realized than any of your own....Ultimately, Ballard is simply a master story writer--the maker of unforgettable artifacts in words, each as absolute and perplexing as sculptures unviewable from a single perspective. In this book of 98 stories, there are at least 30 you can spend a lifetime returning to, to wander and wonder around.--Jonathan Lethem

From the Back Cover:

“More than one thousand compelling pages from one of the most haunting, cogent, and individual imaginations in contemporary literature.”—William Boyd

Never before published in its entirety in America, with many stories new to American readers, The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard is a monumental achievement by one of our greatest literary geniuses. Featuring such classics as “Prima Belladonna,” “The Drowned Giant,” and “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,” the book evokes Poe and Kafka, Borges and Bradbury in its astonishing ability to render psychosis and modern paranoia in phantasmagorical detail on the printed page.

Praise for J.G. Ballard:

“Ballard will be remembered as the most original English writer of the last century . . . [and] as a one-man genre; no one else is remotely like him. . . . He was sui generis. What was influential, though, was the marvelous creaminess of his prose, and the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery.”—Martin Amis, The Guardian

“When I was a boy, I loved J. G. Ballard. And when I was a teenager, I loved J. G. Ballard. And as an adult, I loved J. G. Ballard.”—Neil Gaiman

“For anyone bored with the stale conventions of mainstream fiction, his 90-odd short stories of stilled time, desolate beauty and personal fulfillment in extreme situations will be sheer delight.”—John Gray, The New Statesman

“[W]ho would argue that ours is not a time of nihilism and that Ballard is not the ideal chronicler of our disturbed modernity?”—Jason Cowley, The Observer

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