As editor of New Worlds, Moorcock aimed to marry the science fiction genre with an avant-garde, speculative tenor. It wasn't just the Kennedy assassination I think I was trying to look for a kind of new logic that would explain all these events.īallard's short story 'The Assassination Weapon' (later to appear as the third chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition) was first published in 1966 in New Worlds and was edited by Ballard's genre fiction colleague and friend Michael Moorcock. Leaving me with these very young children, I felt that a crime had been committed by nature against this young woman - and her children - and I was searching desperately for an explanation To some extent The Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to explain all the terrible violence that I saw around me in the early sixties. I was terribly wounded by my wife's death. The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard admitted in 2007, originated in large part from the sudden death of his first wife Mary from pneumonia: Ballard said 'it was an attempt for me to make sense of that tragic event.'

With titles such as 'Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy', 'Love and Napalm: Export USA', and ' Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan', and by constantly associating the Kennedy assassination with a sexual or sporting event, the work has maintained controversy, especially in the United States, where some considered it a slur on John F. There is some debate on whether the book is an experimental novel with chapters or a collection of linked stories. The edition with annotations is now standard.Īll of the 1970 book originally appeared as stories in magazines before being collected. Ī revised large format paperback edition, with annotations by the author and illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner, was issued by RE/Search in 1990. It was made into a film by Jonathan Weiss in 1998.

Thus, the first US edition was published in 1972 by Grove Press under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA. personally cancelled the publication and had the copies destroyed, fearing legal action from some of the celebrities depicted in the book.

After a 1970 edition by Doubleday & Company had already been printed, Nelson Doubleday Jr. The book was originally published in the UK in 1970 by Jonathan Cape. The Atrocity Exhibition is an experimental novel of linked stories or 'condensed novels' by British writer J.

The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard