Crash: A Novel - Softcover

Ballard, J. G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374524122 ISBN 13: 9780374524128

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994

Synopsis

In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor.

A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

About this title

Review:

J. G. Ballard's graphic, violent novel is controversial wherever it is read, even on Amazon.com's own Web page! The book's characters are obsessed with automobile accidents and are determined to narrate the horrors of the car crash as luridly as possible. In the words of the novel's protagonist, the wounds caused by automobile collisions are "the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology." Read this novel and learn why David Cronenberg, who had previously adapted Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch for the screen, fought to turn it into his latest film.

About the Author:

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China. After the attack on Pearl Harbour the family was interned in a civilian camp. They returned to England in 1946. In 1956 Ballard's first story was published in New Worlds. His first novel, The Drowned World, was published in 1962. Empire of the Sun, a novel based on his own experience in China, was published in 1984 and won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Award and was filmed by Steven Spielberg. He is the author of many collections of short stories and novels, including Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0374524122
• ISBN 13: 9780374524128
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224