Crash [Paperback]

'A work of very powerful originality. Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction' Anthony Burgess

'One of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination' Guardian

'Ballard has issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipates' Will Self

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

'A work of very powerful originality. Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction' Anthony Burgess 'One of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination' Guardian 'Ballard has issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipates' Will Self --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

The cult status of "Crash" has intensified since its original publication in 1973, making it a classic of underground literature. In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a 'TV scientist', experiments with erotic atrocities among crash victims, each more sinister than the last: ultimately, he craves a union of blood, semen and engine coolant in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor.

Like many of Ballard's other novels, the seeds for Crash were sown in a short story or, in effect, the series of stories that were eventually published as The Atrocity Exhibition (or Love and Napalm: Export USA). Described by Will Self as representing `the zenith of the experimental novel in English' and `a profound and disquieting book' by William Burroughs, The Atrocity Exhibition is composed of seemingly disconnected, almost shard-like tales, some made up of short listed paragraphs. Full of extreme imagery and, as its author admits, `rather obsessive sexual fantasies about the prominent figures of the day', it strove, in its fragmentary structure, to emulate the confused (and confusing) messages of news broadcasts, advertising billboards, television commercials and technical manuals. In an author's note readers were advised to `simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye'.
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. 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 most recent novel was Kingdom Come, published in 2006; his autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008 to much acclaim. J.G. Ballard died in 2009.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.