Recommendations from our site
“The Atrocity Exhibition was essentially his response to this completely brutal series of events, and marked a huge shift away from his previous sci-fi novels and towards a much more avant-garde approach to the technological age that was unfolding around him. In it he manages to connect his own grief to very public displays of violence, such as the Kennedy assassination and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the landscape created by the media, the automobile, television, and celebrity culture within the 1960s.” Read more...
Heather Parry, Novelist
“He preferred to call them condensed fictions or condensed novels to experimental short stories. They consist of lexia – paragraph-length prose poems using incredibly technical vocabulary literally borrowing from, sampling from, textbooks and found documents. There are free-associated lists of ideas and objects encountered by the characters. There are magnified images of body-parts of billboards. Incidents of violence – predominantly the Kennedy assassination, but also we know he was reading books about the aftermath of Nagasaki and Hiroshima – these spectacularised, massive, species-scale violent acts haunt the entire collection. And underpinning it is an extremely abstracted surrealist logic whereby geometry is asked to produce emotional or erotic responses.” Read more...
Mark Blacklock, Literary Scholar
