Most Popular Books by J. G. Ballard

Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape.

Ballard''s genius for imagining exotic places appears again in Vermilion Sands where he creates a fantasy landscape of the future. These stories feature forgotten movie queens and guilt-ridden femmes fatales who exercise their every whim in a culture of unlimited technology.

Class war erupts in a luxurious high-rise apartment building.

The stories in this collection explore the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology.

"This fable lifts a great freight of ideas effortlessly…The story of an expedition driven on by wishes of possession and power but guided internally by myths of America whose sources lie in the late 20th century." —Guardian Following the energy crisis of the late twentieth century, America has been abandoned. Now, a century later, a small group of European explorers returns to the now climatically mutated continent. But America is unrecognizable—the Bering Strait has been dammed and much of the country has become a desert, populated by isolated natives and the bizarre remnants of a disintegrated culture. The expedition sets off from Manhattan on a cross-country journey, through Holiday Inns and abandoned theme parks, to uncover a shocking new power in the heart of Las Vegas.

An unemployed advertising executive investigates why the deranged man who shot his father in a shopping mall was released without being charged.

A 35-year-old architect is driving home from his London office when his car swerves and crashes onto a traffic island lying below three converging motorways. Uninjured, he climbs the embankment to seek help, but no one will stop for him and he is trapped on the island, where he remains.

"[A] chilling . . . tale about humans who gamely follow their own worst instincts.”—Chicago Tribune Led by a charismatic and slightly unhinged woman, a group of environmentalists wrest control over a small South Pacific island in hopes of cultivating it into their own private Eden. But paradise is not quite what it seems in this “searing” (Kirkus Reviews) send-up of environmentalism, feminism, and extremism of all sorts.

The classic, award-winning novel, made famous by Steven Spielberg’s film, tells of a young boy’s struggle to survive World War II in China. Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him. Shanghai, 1941—a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war...and the dawn of a blighted world. Ballard’s enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.

At Port-la-Nouvelle, on the parched terrain of central Africa, Dr. Mallory watches as his clinic fails and dreams of discovering a third Nile that will make the Sahara bloom. When there is a trickle on the local airstrip, and soon a river, the obsessed Mallory claims it as his own creation and sets out for the river’s source.

Yet again J. G. Ballard’s inimitable clairvoyance is on display in this timely, powerful story of a community shattered by a massive act of violence. A massacre rocks a suburban utopia—thirty-two adults murdered, and their children missing—in Running Wild, one of Ballard’s most dazzlingly subversive works of fiction. “To Ballard, lack of choice . . . is a dangerous state of being. In Running Wild, it’s not the children who are doing the running; it is the society that raised them” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Collects all ninety-two of the late author''s stories -- including "Prima Belladonna," "Dead Time," and "The Index" -- which span five decades and explore everything from musical orchids to human cannibalism to the secret history of World War III.

A war-ravaged Beirut is the setting for the title story of this visionary collection, a tale in which a young street fighter inadvertently discovers how to bring an to the bloodshed only to find that his solution is all too effective as far as some supposedly neutral observers are concerned. Other stories feature an assassination plot against an American astronaut, the leader of an authoritarian religious movement; a man who is destroyed by a car crash and resolves never to leave his apartment again; and the survivor of a toxic-waste ship wrecked on a deserted Caribbean island.

In this acclaimed speculative novel, the author of Crash imagines an exclusive business park that hides a ghastly mystery: “One of his finest” (San Francisco Chronicle). For forty years, J.G. Ballard has shared his unnervingly prescient vision of where civilization was headed. He kept his unflinching eye on the point where technological progress has worn away our humanity. And Super-Cannes is Ballard at his best: “Rarely has his vision been so total, his creation so complete” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Eden-Olympia is more than just a multinational business park. Isolated and secure, overlooking the French Riviera, it is a virtual city-state offering the latest in services and facilities for the most elite high-tech industries. Yet one day Dr. Greenwood from Eden-Olympia’s clinic goes on a suicidal shooting spree. Dr. Jane Sinclair is hired as his replacement, and she and her husband, Paul, are given Dr. Greenwood’s house as a residence. Convalescing after an accident, Paul becomes fascinated with Dr. Greenwood and his shocking crimes. Clues in the house lead him to question Eden-Olympia’s official account. While Jane is lured deeper into Eden-Olympia’s inner workings, Paul uncovers the dangerous psychological vents that maintain its smoothly running surface. Soon he finds himself in race against crushing forces that may be beyond anyone’s control.

In this sequel to his award-winning Empire of the Sun, young James returns to England at the end of World War II. He stumbles through medical study at Cambridge, trains briefly as an RAF pilot in Canada, and marries. When his wife dies suddenly, Jim is thrust into the violence and sexual promiscuity of the sixties. Penetrating and wise, J. G. Ballard''s biting social commentary and pushing of boundaries make this semi-autobiographical novel a small classic.

A startling and at times unsettlingly prescient collection of J.G. Ballard’s greatest interviews.

From one of the most powerful and original talents in science fiction comes the story of a new world--a strange world where solar radiation fluctuations have melted the polar ice caps, flooding the land and raising the temperature of the atmosphere.

A highly sought cultural commentator, J. G. Ballard has provided thoughtful remarks on the state of the world for decades. J.G. Ballard Conversations brings together several of Ballard''s latest interviews and gives readers penetrating insight into the mind of one of the freshest thinkers at work today. Covering topics such at the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the evolution of sexual relationships, and our strange, immersive celebrity culture, this book is a fount of provocative takes on the things that matter. Rounded out with rare photographs of Ballard and supplemental resources, J.G. Ballard Conversations is a necessary item for anyone interested in the modern world

A collection of novelist''s non-fiction writings spanning more than thirty years addresses topics including the arts, science, literature, popular culture, and his own life.

J. G. Ballard''s collected nonfiction from 1962 to 2007, mapping the cultural obsessions, experiences, and insights of one of the most original minds of his generation. J. G. Ballard was a colossal figure in English literature and an imaginative force of the twentieth century. Alongside seminal novels—from the notorious Crash (1973) to the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984)—Ballard was a sought-after reviewer and commentator, publishing journalism, memoir, and cultural criticism in a variety of forms. This volume collects the most significant short nonfiction of Ballard''s fifty-year career, extending the range of the only previous collection of his nonfiction, A User''s Guide to the Millennium (1996), which selected essays and reviews published between 1962 and 1995. A decade on from Ballard''s death in 2009, a new generation of readers needs a new collection. In the period following A User''s Guide, Ballard''s writing addressed 9/11, British politics from New Labour onward, and what he termed “the rise of soft fascism”—a diagnosis that maintains its relevance amid a shift toward right populism in European and US politics. Beautifully edited by Ballard scholar and novelist Mark Blacklock, this volume includes Ballard''s editorials and manifestos; commentaries on his own work; commentaries on the work of others; reviews; and more. Above all, it makes the case for the currency of Ballard''s work at a contemporary juncture at which so many of his diagnoses concerning the media and politics have become apparent.

From the iconic author of Crash and Empire of the Sun, Cocaine Nights features a man who finds himself drawn into a network of drugs, pornography, and murder in a Spanish resort. The remarkable bestseller from one of the giants of modern British literature--at once an engrossing mystery and an unnerving vision of a society coming to terms with a life of unlimited leisure. When Charles Prentice arrives in Spain to investigate his brother''s involvement in the death of five people in a fire in the upmarket coastal resort of Estrella de Mar, he gradually discovers that beneath the civilised, cultured surface of this exclusive enclave for Britain''s retired rich there flourishes a secret world of crime, drugs and illicit sex . What starts as an engrossing mystery develops into a mesmerising novel of ideas--a dazzling work of the imagination from one of Britain''s most original and controversial novelists.

An apocalyptic dystopia like no other, one whose "originality and power [of] vision can be felt" (Times Literary Supplement). Water. Man’s most precious commodity is a luxury of the past. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the Earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on the dying land, civilization itself begins to crack. The world is threatened by dramatic climate change in this highly acclaimed and influential novel, one of the most important early works by the best-selling author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

The author of such novels as "Empire of the Sun" and "Crash" recalls his childhood, his first attempts at science fiction, and his life as a single father after the premature death of his wife.

"A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire." —New York Times Book Review When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is transformed. Vultures invade rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man’s urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations toward an apocalyptic climax. In this characteristically inventive novel Ballard displays to devastating effect the extraordinary imagination that has established him as one of the twentieth century’s most visionary writers.

Controversial science fiction writer, J.G. Ballard, tells of his unorthodox upbringing in Shanghai in the 1940''s. Ballard has achieved acclaim for works such as Empire of the Sun, and controversy over Crash, which investigates the psychosexual significance of the car crash. The book includes an article on Ballard Mythmaker of the 20th Century by William S. Burroughs, and chapter one of Crash, plus Ballard''s introduction to the French edition.

The wealthy inhabitants of a luxurious, well-designed apartment complex become engaged in hostilities that begin in the dropping of debris onto lower balconies and climax in drunken, marauding attacks by rival floor tribes

The West African jungle starts to crystallize - the trees are metamorphosed into enormous jewels, crocodiles are encased in second skins. Most men flee the area in terror, but some remain to drift through this dreamworld forest. By the author of Empire of the Sun.