Vermilion Sands - Softcover

Ballard, J. G.

3.88

1,713 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881844225 ISBN 13: 9780881844221

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc, 1988

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In a futuristic resort populated by forgotten movie queens and scheming dilettantes, a sinister undercurrent of dangerous ideas threatens to disrupt the colony's languor.

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Review:

"Pure, weird pleasure" (Los Angeles Times)

"Ballard's best and most characteristic work is in his early novels and short stories" (New Statesman)

"The most significant English novelist of the second half of the 20th century" (Will Self Prospect)

"A writer of enormous inventive powers, Ballard has, like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filing the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination" (Malcolm Bradbury New York Times Book Review)

"Ballard is a magician and a literary saboteur...He is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination – and a national treasure" (Guardian)

From the Publisher:

'Ballard is a magician and a literary saboteur' Guardian
‘One of the brightest stars in post-war fiction’ Kingsley Amis

‘He is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination – and a national treasure’ Guardian

Vermilion Sands is a fully automated desert-resort designed to fulfil the most exotic whims of the idle rich, but now languishes in uneasy decay, populated only by forgotten movie queens, solitary impresarios and the remittance men of the artistic and literary world. It is a lair for beachcombers, hangers-on and malignant obsessions – a place where sensitive pigments paint portraits of their mistresses in a grotesque parody of art; where prima donna plants are programmed to sing operatic arias; where dial-a-poem computers have replaced poets; where psychosensitive houses are driven to murder by their owners’ neuroses; and where love and lust, in the hands of jewel-eyed Jezebels, pall before the stronger pull of evil.

‘A writer of enormous inventive powers, Ballard has a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination’ Malcolm Bradbury

‘Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction’ Anthony Burgess

'One of the grand magicians of modern fiction' Brian Aldiss

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