Jeannette Baxter is Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, specializing in modern and contemporary fiction.

• General Editor's Foreword; Acknowledgements; Contributors; Chronology or a Version of J. G. Ballard's Life; Foreword by Toby Litt; Introduction: J. G. Ballard and the Contemporary, Jeannette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge); 1. The Geometry of the Space Age: J. G. Ballard's short fiction and science fiction of the 1960s, Brian Baker (Lancaster University); 2. Disquieting Features: An Introductory Tour to The Atrocity Exhibition, Jake Huntley (University of East Anglia); 3. The Gothic, the Body, and the Failed Homeopathy Argument: Reading Crash, Victor Sage (University of East Anglia); 4. Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard, Corin Depper (Kingston University); 5. Mind is the Battlefield: Reading Ballard's 'Life Trilogy' as War Literature, Umberto Rossi (Rome); 6. From Shanghai to Shepperton: Crises of Representation in J. G. Ballard's Londons, Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope University); 7. Visions of Europe in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, Jeannette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge); 8. The Possibilities of Sacrifice, the Certainties of Trauma: J. G. Ballard's Postmillenial Fiction, Philip Tew (Brunel University); Afterword by Toby Litt; Interview with J.G. Ballard by Jeannette Baxter; Further Reading; Index.

"The extraordinary fictions of J. G. Ballard, so long overlooked by the academy, are finally beginning to get the academic criticism they deserve. This collection offers a host of incisive essays, sandwiched between Toby Litt's meditations on Ballard's work and an interview with Ballard himself, who cheerfully announces the arrival of a new Dark Age -- by fax, weirdly enough. In between, diverse critical voices cover Ballard's fiction from the sixties to the noughties, from SF to crime, from future apocalypse to domestic memoir. A very worthy addition to the scholarship of one of the post-war era's most important writers."- Professor Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, University of London.