"One day in the near future, when the last corporate headquarters has been torn down and we all earn our livings at the domestic terminal, anthologies of twentieth-century inter-office memos may be as treasured as the correspondence of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot."

• J.G. Ballard

"Collected for the first time, these are the nonfiction writings of one of this century's most important voices.

Among Ballard's subjects are Dali and de Sade, Marilyn Monroe and Nancy Regan, atom bombs and highways, sex and science fiction.

The pieces -- more than ninety in all, written between 1963 and 1995 -- exhibit the same sharp vision and sharper prose that has distinguished all of BAllard's fiction. Is fascination or and fixation upon this century take him from William Burroughs to Elvis Presley, and through his eyes we see our times more clearly and more pointedly."