The Complete Short Stories

The second in a two volume collection of acclaimed short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun, Crash, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

JG Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and influential novelists. However, during his long career he was also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which show the germination of ideas he used in his longer fiction.

This, the second book in a two-volume collection, offers a platform from which to view Ballard’s other works. Almost all of his novels had their seeds in short stories and this collection provides an extraordinary opportunity to trace the development of one of Britain’s most visionary writers.

Reviews

‘The most important British contemporary writer’ Will Self, Independent

‘Ballard is the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination – and a national treasure’ Nicholas Royle, Guardian

‘A writer of enormous inventive powers. Ballard has … a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination’ Malcolm Bradbury, New York Times

‘In a shrinking world increasingly bereft of original imaginations, J.G. Ballard stands alone, a bizarre visionary maverick’ Eileen Bradbury, Irish Times

‘J.G. Ballard is a magician of the contemporary scene…His fantastical landscapes are among the most haunting in English literature. No one else writes with such enchanted clarity or strange power’ Guardian

About the author

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai. After internment in a civilian prison camp, his family returned to England in 1946. 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 controversial novel Crash was made into a film by David Cronenberg. His autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008, and a collection of interviews with the author, Extremem Metaphors, will be published in 2012. J.G. Ballard died in 2009.