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 Withdrawn by E.P. Dutton after having been shredded by Doubleday, this outrageous work was finally in a small edition by Grove before lapsing out-of-print.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 peices, extensive annotations (a book in themselves).

• Chapter 1: The Atrocity Exhibition
• Chapter 5: Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown
• Chapter 12: Crash!

Table of Contents

"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 rarified 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