Pranks, Punk and Industrial Culture from V. Vale

Rare Signed Limited Hardback now seven hundred dollars on Internet; ours only $200. (We still have the $20 paperback.)

Also see Signed Hardback edition for 200.00 under "special release" below! Excerpts: * Chapter 1: The Atrocity Exhibition * Chapter 5: Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown * Chapter 12: Crash! Table of Contents The Atrocity Exhibition---By J G Ballard---a Signed Copy (Includes: Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan )(Aka: Love and Napalm-Eport Usa ) by Ballard, J G (Signed), Foreword By William S Burroughs, Introduction By V Vale First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of "Crash" and "Super-Cannes", who has supplied explanatory notes for this new edition. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character's dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, pscyhopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.

Reviews:

"The distinction between sanity and insanity, real and imagined events, is not insisted upon. [This book] is about violence and sex, but it is also a poetic inquiry into the difference between fictions and realities." Evergreen Review

" . . . entertaining and even enlightening . . . " San Francisco Weekly

" . . . a moving glimpse at the rarefied world of deformity; a glimpse that ultimately succeeds in its goal of humanizing the inhuman, revealing the beauty that often lies behind the grotesque and dramatically illustrating the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming debility." Spectrum Weekly

"'The Atrocity Exhibition' is remarkably fresh. One does not read these narratives as one does other fiction, in a linear mode where action and character serve to entertain. Rather, one enters them as into a kind of ritual, in which the configuration of psychology and language confronts the reader with the cruelty, violence and repression that inform contemporary life.

One element in these fictions their author would doubtless appreciate is that they are, indeed, practically impossible to describe. Imagine a short story combining auto crashes, murders, and political/intellectual insights in a kind of sexual drama, in a pop landscape littered with grotesque anatomical references.

The experimentalists at RE/Search Publications, whose books concentrate on the more obscure and shocking aspects of modernity, ranging from performance art to self-mutilation have justifiably viewed 'The Atrocity Exhibition' as a modernist classic." Stephen Schwartz -- SF Chronicle

Metro Silicon Valley

J.G. Ballard is the Dr Moreau of British fiction, creator of controlled environments and out-of-control dystopias...Ballard understands the transformation technology may effect on human desire.

The Observer

'Sex times Technology equals The Future,' proposed J.G. Ballard in 1972. For those who can't wait: be forewarned: the future never comes. With its promise of arousal and endlessly deferred climax, the formula, as quoted in a fabulous if messily designed [?] new volume of interviews called JG Ballard Conversations (RE/Search Publications, $19.99).

A recurring theme, wistfully expressed, through these conversations spanning two decades with RE/Search publisher Vale, Survival Research Laboratories' Mark Pauline, SPK founder turned film composer Graeme Revell, and more, is the decline in literacy and ever-shortening attention spans in the Internet age of instant gratification.

Ballard himself confesses to having little interest in music, yet for much of the 1970s and early 1980s, he was regularly featured in the UK music weekly NME, where the adjective 'Ballardian' was applied to the gear-crashing rhythm of David Bowie's "Station to Station," Martin Hannett's production of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, the machine grind of DAF, and so on. But the most significant explorations of the terrains mapped in Ballard's fiction (and retrospectively in the dialogues of J.G. Ballard Conversations) happened in Industrial Culture. Daniel Miller aka The Normal's "Warm Leatherette," Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle's grisly pathologies of the British suburban hinterland, SPK's information overloads, and the short-circuitng noise of Non's "Rise" stand as powerful testaments to the legacy of Ballard's impact. Not forgetting, of course, the writer's longstanding relationship with his most sympathetic publisher, Vale, at RE/Search, whose roots are in the West Coast punk-and-after journal Search & Destroy (issue #10 featured a J.G. Ballard interview).

Ballard's influence persists through Matmos's queasy 2001 album "A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure (Matador) and J.G. Thirlwell's score for Jonathan Weiss's 2001 experimental film version of The Atrocity Exhibition (Reel23 DVD).

Wire

It's a finely produced book in a new handbag ? or manbag ? size, and certainly one that any Ballard obsessive, and you know who you are, will want to own. Ballard comes across as a warm, private man and a highly prescient writer: recent news images of 100-mile traffic jams outside Houston as people fled hurricane Rita, or passengers on a flaming jetliner witnessing their predicament unravelling live on televisions inside their own aircraft, appear to have come straight out of his fiction. This is, for me, where the Ballard Paradox comes into play: his futures share so much with our present, that they can now feel a little old-fashioned, making even his earlier writing seem increasingly less like science fiction as time marches on.

The interviews date from 1983 to 2004, during which time Ballard's opinions and obsessions ? power, celebrity, media domination, war, politics and the future (and what else is there?) ? have remained fairly constant in a changing world, perhaps because he was already into his 50s when the first interviews took place. Our man in Shepperton reveals a solid grasp of the broad sweep of both historical and contemporary geopolitical affairs, as well as the human, and inhuman condition. On a more personal note you'll find insights into the origins of Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard's childhood experiences in a Japanese POW camp (the basis for Empire pf the Sun, his experience of success and Hollywood following Steven Spielberg's film of that "breakthrough" book. And he likes cats. A lot. It's also interesting to discover that while Ballard has always been something of a respected, almost canonical, late 20th century author in the UK, his earlier books were difficult to obtain for American readers, where he has developed a cult following akin to that of William S Burroughs, largley thanks to the work of Re/Search. While not a Ballardophile myself, reading these interviews has driven me to dig out some of his short story collections, so the programme works.

Strange Attractor

Conversations has a dozen new and unpublished interviews from various contributors. In a recent discussion with Vale, Ballard looks behind the enemy line and predicts 'a crisis will arise that will seed the neo-con mentality, and what at present seems a rather strange aberration on the part of America's ruling elite, will come to seem completely acceptable in a surprisingly short space of time.' But he finds some hope in the internet's uncensored world, and that 'if we're entering a New Dark Age, the internet could help keep the lights on!' In another conversation he discusses the ascendant 'New Religiosity' and the 'new blueprint for a kind of militaristic religion'...

Pataphysics

Excerpts:

* Interview with J.G. Ballard o Shepperton o Imagination, Obsession * Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell * Excerpt from Crash * The Atrocity Exhibition * Sixty Minute Zoom * From Shanghai to Shepperton * The Fourfold Symbolism of Ballard by David Pringle * Essay on J.G. Ballard by Graeme Revell * Ballard: Quotations

Reviews:

"The magazine has been edited with a rare combination of devotion and intelligence and has been designed with equal imagination." - Time Out

"Ballard . . . is the most engaged of Surrealists, engaged not directly in politics, but with forcing his readers to see the strangeness of the ordinary world." - New Statesman

"Sex Times Technology Equals the Future." -- J.G. Ballard

Details:

The Atrocity Exhibition - A large-format, illustrated edition, Atrocity Exhibition is widely regarded as Ballard's finest, most complex work. Withdrawn by E.P. Dutton after having been shredded by Doubleday, this outrageous work was finally in a small edition by Grove before lapsing out-of-print. with four additional fiction pieces, extensive annotations (a book in themselves). Includes notes on the original writings by Ballard himself and beautiful illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner, plus haunting infrared photographs by Ana Barrado.

RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard - A comprehensive special on this supremely relevant writer, now famous for Empire of the Sun and Crash. This strikingly illustrated volume contains interviews and a wealth of rare selections from every aspect of Ballard's career.

J.G. Ballard: Quotes - The musician Nick Cave once said that he keeps this book on his bedside table. 'Sex times Technology equals The Future,' proposed J.G. Ballard in 1972. For those who can't wait: be forewarned: the future never comes. With its promise of arousal and endlessly deferred climax, the formula is echoed repeatedly in today's world of advertising. J.G. Ballard not only was the first primary writer to deal with ecological catastrophes (in his first four novels), but also the first to recognize the significance of celebrity and psychopathology in the future media-inundated landscape. He psychoanalyzed the ulterior significance of the car crash in his book CRASH, and mapped out Inner Space as the primary cultural territory of the future -- as he signaled the Death of the Space Age.

J.G. Ballard Quotes - In today's dense communications environment, where the average New Yorker experiences 14,000 branding messages each day one needs to continually make sense of a bafflingly complex, constantly changing environment. Brief, succinct quotes can quickly produce clarity amid moral murkiness--like a torch illuminating a dark forest ahead.

This book is especially aimed at all who have to work for a living. It is our hope that many a commute may be mollified by this quotations book, which is easy to carry and use--just one minute at a bus stop may yield an inspiration sufficient to set one's imagination reeling.

J.G. Ballard CONVERSATIONS: in these collected dialogues, Ballard proves himself to be among the most prophetic visionaries of the 21st century. His advice RE the longterm economic downturn we're immersed in: "I remain optimistic!"

Search & Destroy #10: tabloid has an interview with J.G. Ballard PLUS an interview with William S. Burroughs, available nowhere else. Impossible to find in a store.

"I'm proud to say I knew the man who wrote this book. Willeford writes with quiet authority, has the ability to make his situations, scenes, dialogue, sound absolutely real." -Elmore Leonard

"The prose is clean and tough and flows easily." -The New York Times Book Review

"A tempo so relentless, words practically fly off the pages." -The Village Voice

"HIGH PRIEST OF CALIFORNIA - The hairiest, ballsiest hard-boiled ever penned. One continuous orgy of prolonged foreplay! WILD WIVES: sex, schizophrenia and sadism blend into a recipe for sudden doom!" - Dennis McMillan.

Both novels evoke San Francisco in the Fifties, with rich details of place and lushly etched characters of every stripe. Willeford's genius has never been more more pugnacious than in these two early works.