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The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard |  | Author: J. G. Ballard
Creator: Martin Amis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
Buy New: $23.10
as of 7/29/2010 22:27 CDT details
You Save: $11.90 (34%)
Seller: Amazon.com
Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 90235
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 1216
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 2.4
ISBN: 0393072622
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780393072624
ASIN: 0393072622
Publication Date: September 21, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| • | ISBN13: 9780393072624 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
“More than one thousand compelling pages from one of the most haunting, cogent, and individual imaginations in contemporary literature.”—William Boyd 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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Terrific, but not actually complete July 15, 2010
Megarat (Squirt Island, USA, Earth)
This is a terrific collection of J.G. Ballard stories, and have covered my thoughts about his writing pretty well. I am posting this essentially as a notice that, in spite of the title of this collection, it is not "complete". Among the missing are (at least that I have noticed) "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" and "The Atrocity Exhibition" (I'm not sure how this one went missing, considering an entire separate collection was named after it).
So it's a great collection, but I'm docking one star in my review for what I consider to be misleading title/description.
The content is great, but... June 11, 2010
Robert Keith (Melbourne, Australia)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a great collection from one of the most interesting writers of fiction ever. J. G. Ballard routinely expressed more original ideas in ten pages than most current popular authors stretch out to a thousand. However, this is the heaviest and most unwieldy book I have ever experienced. Apart, of course, from reference books that one doesn't read for entertainment. The Kindle doesn't work for me.
I love short fiction from the '50s and '60s. I have collected many editions of short stories such as the beautifully bound collections from the New England Science Fiction Association. I also work out regularly and have no problem with massive bricks of books, having waded my way through some of Neal Stephenson's recent output. This edition is seriously heavy. I was unable to hold it in position to read it for any length of time. Carrying it on trains and planes was out of the question. It wouldn't prop open on a table. The pages are flimsy, blow about and crease easily. the binding is too weak for the weight of the book and started failing almost immediately. This is not a high quality edition.
I eventually committed the ultimate sacrilege and cut it into four manageable volumes. I am now able to enjoy the stories, a few of which I read in my youth. Yesterday I was on flights and in airports for over 30 hours. I could not have carried the original hideous brick but two of the smaller volumes were easy to carry.
 The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard January 11, 2010
Sacramento Book Review (Sacramento, CA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The collection of all of J.G. Ballard's short fiction collection is a compendium of one author's short fictional experiences. The stories span from 1956 to 1996, showing the growth of Ballard; as one reads his stories, one gets the impression that Ballard's craft was born mature. What grew in all these decades was the breath of his fiction's subject matter.
The stories cross genres, mixing speculation, literature, science fiction and fantasy. In presenting the world as readily catastrophic, because of humanity's spirit of adventure, Ballard also sails close to horror and mystery. Yet, as the author intended, all the stories literary at heart. Of the 98 stories, there are those that will draw your attention immediately. "Concentration City" imagines a world connected by rapid and vast urban development, an excess where street numbers are topple the millions and city sky rises whose levels can easily exceed three thousand. In "Prima Belladona," characters get the sense of being watched, just as they desire, in some voyeuristic fashion, to watch others. In "Escapement," the world is mysterious; reality blends with fantasy in a way that questions the very meaning of existence.
These stories speak to Ballard's prodigious imagination.
Reviewed by Emmanuel Sigauke
The Definitive J.G. Ballard Short-Story Collection October 26, 2009
Terry Sunday (El Paso, Texas United States)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
I first learned about the work of British science fiction writer J.G. Ballard as a junior-high-school student, when I bought (for 50 cents!) a brand-new 1962 Berkeley Medallion paperback edition of his prescient end-of-the-world novel "The Drowned World" (I still have it). His surreal, evocative story of a dysfunctional group of people exploring the steaming, verdant lagoons of flooded cities on an Earth transformed into "the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun" blew me away at the time. I eagerly bought Ballard's novels and short-story collections as they appeared for years afterwards, until I drifted away from science fiction. Now, with my interest in sci-fi rekindled and with "The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard," I again have at my fingertips, in one convenient volume, all of his stories that made such a strong impression on me as a youth.
If you're reading this review, you probably already know about the late Mr. Ballard's unique, dystopian, psychologically themed, often controversial sci-fi work. So I won't try to sell you on him as an author. If you like his work, you're probably already at least mildly interested in "The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard." If you don't know or like his work--and it most definitely is not for everyone--then you'll have no interest in the book. So, assuming you're in the former category, is this a book you should consider buying?
My answer is an enthusiastic "Yes!" This collection is a fantastic volume, a fantastic value and a "must-have" for any real Ballard fan. When this massive, heavy tome arrived at my front door, I eagerly opened it, in the proper way for a new book, and then flipped through it, savoring the sheer wealth of creativity captured in small print on its 1,199 crisp pages. Then I checked the Table of Contents. The 98 stories included were published between 1956 and 1992. All of my favorites were there--long-remembered classics such as "The Voices of Time," "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," "A Question of Re-Entry" and "The Cage of Sand." Looking further, I came to a sudden realization. I had never read about half of the stories--almost the entire second half of the book. So now I face the pleasant prospect of not only re-reading stories that I've already enjoyed, but also of discovering new ones for the first time. There's not much in the way of "extras" (in DVD parlance)--just a 3-1/2-page Introduction by Martin Amis and a one-page Author's Introduction written in 2001. But the stories here speak for themselves, and the book really needs nothing more. Most highly recommended.
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