The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard [Paperback]

First published in 1978, this collection of nineteen of Ballard's best short stories is as timely and informed as ever. 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 futurist who brought the information age into the mainstream.

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

J.G. Ballardis the author of numerous books, includingEmpire of the Sun, the underground classicCrash, andThe 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 isSuper-Cannes. He died in 2009.

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 ofl3: