{
    "id": 536711,
    "slug": "the-complete-stories-of-jg-ballard-jg-ballard",
    "nstc": null,
    "title": "The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard",
    "subtitle": null,
    "collection_title": null,
    "collection_part_number": null,
    "annotation": null,
    "description": "The American publication of The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard is a landmark event. Increasingly recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic novelists, J.G. Ballard was \u201ca writer of enormous inventive powers,\u201d who, in the words of Malcolm Bradbury, possessed, \u201clike Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of imagination.\u201d\n\nBest known for his novels, such as Empire of the Sun and Crash, Ballard rose to fame as the \u201cideal chronicler of disturbed modernity\u201d (The Observer). Perhaps less known, though equally brilliant, were his devastatingly original short stories, which span nearly fifty years and reveal an unparalleled prescience so unique that a new word \u2013 Ballardian \u2013 had to be invented. Ballard, who wrote that \u201cshort stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available,\u201d regretted the fact that the public had increasingly lost its ability to appreciate them.\n\nWith 98 pulse-quickening stories, this volume helps restore the very art form that Ballard feared was comatose. Ballard\u2019s inimitable style was already present in his early stories, most of them published in science fiction magazines. These stories are surreal, richly atmospheric and splendidly elliptical, featuring an assortment of psychotropic houses, time-traveling assassins, and cities without clocks. Over the next fifty years, his fierce imaginative energy propelled him to explore new topics, including the dehumanization of technology, the brutality of the corporation, and nuclear Armageddon. Depicting the human soul as \u201cbeing enervated and corrupted by the modern world\u201d (New York Times), Ballard began to examine themes like overpopulation, as in \u201cBillenium,\u201d a claustrophobic imagining of a world of 20 billion people crammed into four-square-meter rooms, or the false realities of modern media, as in the classic \u201cWhy I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,\u201d a faux-psychological study of the sexual and violent reactions elicited by viewing Reagan\u2019s face on television, in which Ballard predicted the unholy fusion of pop culture and sound-bite politics thirteen years before Reagan became president. Given Ballard\u2019s heightened powers of perception, it is astonishing that the dehumanized world that he apprehended so acutely neither diminished his own febrile imagination nor his engagement with mankind, evident in every story, including two new ones for this American edition.\n\nSo eerily prophetic is his vision, so commanding are his literary gifts, the import and insight of J.G. Ballard\u2019s deeply humanistic and transcendent works can only grow in years to come.",
    "imprint": null,
    "language_code": "eng",
    "original_language_code": null,
    "page_count": 1199,
    "duration_seconds": null,
    "publication_date_first": "2001-01-01",
    "publication_date_latest": "2001-01-01",
    "cover_url": null,
    "editions": [],
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    "created_at": "2025-09-19T14:42:11+00:00",
    "updated_at": "2025-10-31T00:45:20+00:00",
    "publisher": {
        "id": 4466,
        "slug": "ww-norton-company-inc",
        "name": "W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.",
        "created_at": "2025-09-19T13:13:06+00:00",
        "updated_at": "2025-09-19T15:03:42+00:00"
    },
    "contributors": [
        {
            "id": 325303,
            "slug": "jg-ballard-2",
            "key_names": "Ballard",
            "names_before_key": "J.G.",
            "prefix_to_key": null,
            "contributor_role": "A01",
            "readable_contributor_role": "Author"
        }
    ],
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}