Atrocity Exhibition
A prophetic and experimental masterpiece by J. G. Ballard, the acclaimed author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Super-Cannes’, featuring an introduction by Hari Kunzru.
The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator …
As the protagonist spirals into the depths of a nervous breakdown, his dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, astronauts and car-crash victims. A kaleidoscopic scrapbook of mass culture, his mind fixates on the consumerism of the modern world – a hallucinatory obsession with celebrity, media, sex and violence. With the media infiltrating every corner of our psyche, have the lines blurred between fiction and reality?
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. 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, ‘Extreme Metaphors’, was published in 2012. J. G. Ballard passed away in 2009.