The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard, Anthony Burgess (Introduction)

Overview

First published in 1978, this collection of nineteen of J. G. Ballard's best short stories is as timely and informed as ever. This collection includes “The Garden of Time,” the inspiration for the 2024 Met Gala–fashion’s biggest night.

His tales of the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology, as viewed through a strong microscope, were eerily prescient and now provide greater perspective on our computer-dominated culture.

Ballard's voice and vision have long served as a font of inspiration for today's cyber-punks, the authors and futurists who brought the information age into the mainstream.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312278441
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	07/06/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	104,934
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

J.G. Ballard is the author of numerous books, including Empire of the Sun, the underground classic Crash, and The Kindness of Women. He is revered as one of the most important writers of fiction to address the consequences of twentieth-century technology. His latest book is Super-Cannes. He died in 2009.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Concentration City

Manhole

Chronopolis

The Voices of Time

Deep End

The Overloaded Man

Billennium

The Garden of the Time

Thirteen for Centaurus

The Subliminal Man

The Cage of Sand

End Game

The Drowned Giant

The Terminal Beach

The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D

The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race

The Atrocity Exhibition

Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy

Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagen

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard:

“A visionary in both style and substance . . .The literary equivalent of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A writer of enormous inventive powers. Ballard has, like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination.” —Malcolm Bradbury, The New York Times Book Review

“Complex, obsessive, frequently poetic, and always disquieting chronicles of nature rebelling against humans, of the survival of barbarism in a world of mechanical efficieny, of entropy, anomie, breakdown, ruin . . . The blasted landscapes that his characters inhabit are both external settings and states of mind.” —Luc Sante

From the Publisher