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The complete stories of J.G. Ballard.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 2009.Edition: 1st American edDescription: xv, 1199 p. ; 25 cmISBN:
  • 0393072622
  • 9780393072624
Uniform titles:
  • Short stories
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Contents:
Introduction / by Martin Amis -- Author's introduction -- Prima belladonna -- Escapement -- The concentration city -- Venus smiles -- Manhole 69 -- Track 12 -- The waiting grounds -- Now : zero -- The sound-sweep -- Zone of terror -- Chronopolis -- The voices of time -- The last world of Mr. Goddard -- Studio 5, the stars -- Deep end -- The overloaded man -- Mr. F is Mr. F -- Billennium -- The gentle assassin -- The insane ones -- The garden of time -- The thousand dreams of Stellavista -- Thirteen to Centaurus -- Passport to eternity -- The cage of sand -- The watch-towers -- The singing statues -- The man on the 99th floor -- The subliminal man -- The reptile enclosure -- A question of re-entry -- The time-tombs -- Now wakes the sea -- The Venus hunters -- End-game -- Minus one -- The sudden afternoon -- The screen game -- Time of passage -- Prisoner of the coral deep -- The lost Leonardo -- The terminal beach -- The illuminated man -- The delta at sunset -- The drowned giant -- The Gioconda of the twilight noon -- The volcano dances -- The beach murders -- The day of forever -- The impossible man -- Storm-bird, storm-dreamer -- Tomorrow is a million years -- The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race -- Cry hope, cry fury! -- The recognition -- The cloud-sculptors of Coral D -- Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan -- The dead astronaut -- The Comsat angels -- The killing ground -- A place and a time to die -- Say goodbye to the wind -- The greatest television show on earth -- My dream of flying to Wake Island -- The air disaster -- Low-flying aircraft -- The life and death of God -- Notes towards a mental breakdown -- The 60 minute zoom -- The smile -- The ultimate city -- The dead time -- The index -- The intensive care unit -- Theatre of war -- Having a wonderfu
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library Fiction Ballard, J G Available 33111005680471
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Previous ed. published in Great Britain as: The complete short stories. London : Flamingo, 2001.

Introduction / by Martin Amis -- Author's introduction -- Prima belladonna -- Escapement -- The concentration city -- Venus smiles -- Manhole 69 -- Track 12 -- The waiting grounds -- Now : zero -- The sound-sweep -- Zone of terror -- Chronopolis -- The voices of time -- The last world of Mr. Goddard -- Studio 5, the stars -- Deep end -- The overloaded man -- Mr. F is Mr. F -- Billennium -- The gentle assassin -- The insane ones -- The garden of time -- The thousand dreams of Stellavista -- Thirteen to Centaurus -- Passport to eternity -- The cage of sand -- The watch-towers -- The singing statues -- The man on the 99th floor -- The subliminal man -- The reptile enclosure -- A question of re-entry -- The time-tombs -- Now wakes the sea -- The Venus hunters -- End-game -- Minus one -- The sudden afternoon -- The screen game -- Time of passage -- Prisoner of the coral deep -- The lost Leonardo -- The terminal beach -- The illuminated man -- The delta at sunset -- The drowned giant -- The Gioconda of the twilight noon -- The volcano dances -- The beach murders -- The day of forever -- The impossible man -- Storm-bird, storm-dreamer -- Tomorrow is a million years -- The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race -- Cry hope, cry fury! -- The recognition -- The cloud-sculptors of Coral D -- Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan -- The dead astronaut -- The Comsat angels -- The killing ground -- A place and a time to die -- Say goodbye to the wind -- The greatest television show on earth -- My dream of flying to Wake Island -- The air disaster -- Low-flying aircraft -- The life and death of God -- Notes towards a mental breakdown -- The 60 minute zoom -- The smile -- The ultimate city -- The dead time -- The index -- The intensive care unit -- Theatre of war -- Having a wonderfu

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