The Atrocity Exhibition: Annotated edition
A prophetic and experimental masterpiece by J. G. Ballard, the acclaimed author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Super-Cannes’, featuring an introduction by Hari Kunzru.
The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator …
As the protagonist spirals into the depths of a nervous breakdown, his dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, astronauts and car-crash victims. A kaleidoscopic scrapbook of mass culture, his mind fixates on the consumerism of the modern world – a hallucinatory obsession with celebrity, media, sex and violence. With the media infiltrating every corner of our psyche, have the lines blurred between fiction and reality?
”'Brilliant and unnerving … Ballard is a writer with talent to burn” - The Times
”'These stories - 'condensed novels', Ballard has called them - are a high-water mark in English experimental fiction” - New York Times
”'A powerful book … Phrase and image are constantly disturbing and stimulating” - Sunday Telegraph
”'The terrifying thing about Ballard is his logic; is this science fiction or history written ahead of its time?” - Len Deighton