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Reading lists

What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

Vermilion Sands

'Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction' Anthony Burgess

Ballard's best and most characteristic work is in his early novels and short stories

The most significant English novelist of the second half of the 20th century

A writer of enormous inventive powers, Ballard has, like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filing the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination

Ballard is a magician and a literary saboteur...He is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination – and a national treasure

One of the brightest stars in post-war fiction

One of the grand magicians of modern fiction

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China. After the attack on Pearl Harbour the family was interned in a civilian camp. They returned to England in 1946. In 1956 Ballard's first story was published in New Worlds. His first novel, The Drowned World, was published in 1962. Empire of the Sun, a novel based on his own experience in China, was published in 1984 and won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Award and was filmed by Steven Spielberg. He is the author of many collections of short stories and novels, including Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

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’.

J G Ballard

Welcome to Vermilion Sands, the fully automated desert-resort ready to fulfil your most exotic whims. 
 
Out over the towering Coral D, sky artists paint the sky with clouds. A musical statue is broken down, but finds new life in unwanted places. A mysterious new resident introduces a new way of making poetry - aided by machine. Drawing together some of the most mesmerising and mind-blowing stories from J.G. Ballard's Vermillion Sands art-infused universe, this short collection is a passport into the genius of science fiction's most visionary pioneer. 
 
Includes the stories: Cry Hope, Cry Fury!, The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral-D, Venus Smiles and Studio 5, The Stars 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Venus Smiles (and Other Vermillion Sands Stories)

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What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

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