| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.05
Trade in The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1: v. 1 for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.05, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The Complete Short Stories confirm Ballard's stature as a craftsman of the short story, which often suits his surreal brilliance above and beyond later novels such as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. In his Introduction, Ballard reflects, "the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination." Time and again, whether exploring the furthest reaches of science fiction, or the banal surrealism of English suburban life, Ballard's perverse insight lodges itself in your imagination, as he explores and often punctures what he refers to as "that over-worked hologram called reality". This collection will delight devotees, but it will also allow readers new to Ballard to experience a short-story writer of the stature of Borges, Bradbury or Edgar Allan Poe. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
‘[Ballard has] one of the most haunting, cogent and individual imaginations in contemporary literature’ William Boyd, Mail on Sunday
‘A feast, and not only for those who think – as I do – that Ballard has long been Britain's most original and inventive writer. For anyone bored with the stale conventions of mainstream fiction, his 90-odd stories of stilled time, desolate beauty and personal fulfilment in extreme situations will be sheer delight’ John Gray, New Statesman
‘This marvellous, inexhaustible book is a monument at the end of fertile lands…Ballard is a superb writer; few could publish a book of this size which is never boring, where the invention never flags. Unfailingly ingenious and perverse’ Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph
‘Thank God for J.G. Ballard and his short stories in which wonder and awe never fade. It is no exaggeration to say that Ballard's stories are beyond compare. This is a collection of tales and fables to be savoured by admirers and newcomers alike’ Robert Edric, Spectator
‘Reading this book of collected stories is a peculiarly enriching experience’ Jason Cowley, Observer
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Ballard is fantastic at placing characters into particular spaces and watching them interact and develop within these strict geographical parameters. Space stations, abandoned hotels, beach resorts for the apathetic rich - one gets the feeling that these are all illustrations, surreal microcosms, of our own everyday existence.
By the way, to place these stories in context, read Ballard's Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women - one can really see the significance of aircraft wrecks that litter his stories or the manipulative sirens that inhabit Vermilion Sands.
Plese read this book, and gaze through the weird and wonderful fiction to a clutch of simple truths.
I'm not a great, or quick, reader, and have found this 1000 page collection to keep me happy for almost 12 months! I tend to read one story every other night, and each one is completely different to the last. They're often thought-provoking, often amusing, often surreal, and always entertaining.
These stories come from several collections: The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, The Atrocity Exhibition, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever. Included also are The Recongnition (from 1967/disaster era) and three stories from the 1990's: A Guide to Virtual Death, The Message from Mars & Report from an Obscure Planet. This collection is great value- as the volumes purchased seperately would be a lot more expensive and not in this impressive single volume.
Loads of great stories, from which you can identify his distinctive style concerning death, sex, the future and so much more in a developing polaroid of the present tense. The Garden of Time is one of my favourites, sort of fusion of The Unlimited Dream Company and Last Year at Marienbad. Billennium is a great early work, where overpopulation becomes a factor and a black comic punchline is added (as with works like The Drowned World, the hero embraces the malady- a frequent element in Ballard's oeuvre).
The infamous Why I Want to F*** Ronald Reagan surfaces along with The Assassination of JFK Considered as a Downhill Motor Race from the great Atrocity Exhibition. A familiar character to that work is Traven- who features in the classic The Terminal Beach- where the style of Atrocity Exhibtion is found and features like the death of a wife, the car crash and a tropical geophysicality occur (and recur). It's perfect, as a short story can be (and as the novel can never be, as Ballard correctly states in the intro).
Too many stories to detail, ones that I've liked include The Comsat Angels, Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown, Having a Wonderful Time, Report on an Unidentifed Space Station, The Man who Walked on the Moon and Chronopolis.
This collection, along with such longer works as Empire of the Sun/The Kindness of Women; the urban disaster trilogy of Crash, Concrete Island & High Rise; The Atrocity Exhibtion; Super Cannes; Cocaine Nights; Vermillion Sands; The Drowned World & The Crystal World provide a mass of evidence that Ballard is one of the greatest voices of the 20th century. His style may be his own fusion of Conrad and Burroughs, but there has frequently be a writer more interesting in 20th century fiction. My only quibble is I would have liked notes on each story, like in the annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition; a minor gripe regarding a great selection of brilliant short stories.
Having read a small selection of his short stories and thoroughly enjoyed 'Crash', 'Super-cannes' and 'Empire... Read more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
