BALLARD, J. G.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Crash. First edition, review copy, with the publisher's slip loosely inserted. Ballard's controversial novel follows a group of car-crash fetishists in London.In 1970 Ballard successfully staged a controversial exhibition "Crashed Cars" at the New Arts Laboratory, which featured cars damaged in real road accidents. The vitriolic response to the exhibition prompted him to write Crash, "a paean to the delirious psychosexuality of celebrity car crashes" (ODNB). While many reviewers were horrified by the book's graphic content, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard hailed it as "the first great novel of the universe of simulation" in his landmark book Simulacra and Simulation (1981). David Cronenberg adapted the book into an equally controversial film in 1996, staring James Spader and Holly Hunter.

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