The complete short stories - Hardcover

Ballard,J.G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007124058 ISBN 13: 9780007124053

Publisher: Flamingo, 2001

Synopsis

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes – regarded by many as Britain’s No 1 living fiction writer.

With sixteen novels over four decades – from The Drowned World in 1962 to the controversial Crash in 1973, the award-winning, semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun in 1984 and his recent Sunday Times bestseller Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists.

Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’, appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future, and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories – including four that have not previously appeared in a collection – have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity to review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers.

About this title

About the Author

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His controversial novel Crash has recently been made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg.

Review

'The most important contemporary British writer.' Will Self, Independent 'He has had from the start an extraordinary descriptive gift, an eye for the mood and code of the visual environment that is like Poe's, but steadier. He remains most effective in the tight capsule of the short story.' Richard Holmes, The Times 'Ballard is the most modern of writers; his art engages with the artefacts and obsessions of the second half of the century in a manner and with an intensity umatched by any other writer.' William Boyd, Daily Telegraph 'J.G. Ballard is a magician of the contemporary scene and a literary saboteur. Ballard's fantastical landscapes are among the most haunting in English literature. No one else writes with such enchanted clarity or strange power.' Ian Thomson, Guardian

Edition details

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007124058
• ISBN 13: 9780007124053
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1189