Book description
The definitive cult, post-modern novel - a shocking blend of violence,
transgression and eroticism.
When Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a
man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world
around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's
wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled
impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV
scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered
around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with
a series of auto-erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last.
But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash - a head-on collision of blood,
semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.
First published in 1973 Crash remains one of the most shocking novels
of the second half of the twentieth century and was made into an equally
controversial film by David Cronenberg.
Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008 and
Extreme Metaphors, a collection of interviews with the author, is due
out in 2012. '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 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 last novel Kingdom Come, was published in 2006; his
autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008 to much acclaim. J.
G. Ballard passed away in 2009.
