The Psychological Fictions Of J G Ballard

J. G. Ballard self-professedly 'devoured' the work of Freud as a teenager, and entertained early thoughts of becoming a psychiatrist; he opened his novel-writing career with a manifesto declaring his wish to write a science fiction exploring not outer but 'inner space', and declaring the need for contemporary fiction to be viewed 'as a branch of neurology'. He also apparently welcomed a reader's report on Crash (1973) condemning him as 'beyond psychiatric help' as confirming his achievement of 'total artistic success'. Samuel Francis investigates Ballard's engagement with psychology and the psychological in his fiction, tracing the influence of key figures including Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung and R.D. Laing and placing his work in the context of the wider fields of psychology and psychiatry. While the psychological preoccupations of his writing are very clear - including his use of concepts such as the unconscious, psychopathology, 'deviance', obsession, abnormal psychology and schizophrenia - this is the first book to offer a detailed analysis of this key conceptual and historical context for his fiction.

Coming in March 2016 from acclaimed director Ben Wheatley, a major motion picture adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s compelling and unnerving tale of what happens when life in a luxury apartment building descends into chaos, starring Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans and Elisabeth Moss.

A masterpiece of fiction from J. G. Ballard, which asks could Consumerism turn into Facism?

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’.

This fast-paced narrative by the author of 'Crash' and 'Empire of the Sun' is a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.

J. G. Ballard was, for over fifty years, one of this country's most significant writers. Beginning with the events that inspired his classic novel, ‘Empire of the Sun’, this revelatory autobiography charts the course of his astonishing life.

This book is the first sustained investigation of the political dimension in the work of J.G. Ballard. A product of and reaction to the cultural-socio-economic moment commonly designated as the postmodern condition, Ballard’s oeuvre is read as a continuous and developing meditation on the postmodern, examining it specifically as an expression of late capitalism. The book shows that at the heart of this meditation lies the question of resistance. Drawing on a wide range of concepts and ideas taken from the field of critical theory, it argues that in the face of a world marked by an unprecedented expansion of capital, in which modernity’s grand narratives have been invalidated and in which received forms of political struggle have lost their effectiveness, Ballard’s fiction commits itself to a deliberately irrational and extreme, pataphysical thought in order to develop a new discourse of resistance. Against past readings that have construed Ballard’s writing as non-political, decadent, or quietist, the study thus reveals Ballard as a thoroughly political author, committed to a subversive politics. In this way, the book also constitutes a timely intervention in the ongoing discussion concerning the nature and state of the political.

A FUTURISTIC COVER - COMES WITH 3D GLASSES! Welcome to Vermilion Sands, the fully automated desert-resort ready to fulfil your most exotic whims. Home to the idle rich it now languishes in uneasy decay, populated only by forgotten movie queens, solitary impresarios and the remittance men of the artistic and literary world. Discover prima donna plants programmed to sing operatic arias, dial-a-poem computers and psychosensitive houses capable of murder. These quintessentially Ballardian short stories of dystopian modernity are Ballard’s ‘guess at what the future will actually be like’.