An Insicrbed Atrocity
BALLARD, J.G. Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A. New York:Grove Press.1972
8vo. Original publishers black cloth with red title lettering to spine, Red pictorial dust jacket depicting a skull designed by Kay Susmann, pp. [iv], 157, [i], slight bumping to head of spine and waterstaining to lower portion of dust jacket, otherwise very good.
First US edition, inscribed to the title page with an introduction by William Burroughs
As the blurb of this edition relays, "Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A. is a unique and disturbing newsreel of our unconscious minds told in fifteen different sections". These interlinked stories were called by Ballard 'condensed novels' and amoungst the violences of the world that are purused is the assasination of Kennedy and the cult of Marilyn Monroe. Described by William Burroughs in this preface as "a profound and disquieting book",
The book was first published in the UK in 1970 by Jonathan Cape under the name 'The Atrocity Project'. A 1970 edition by Doubleday & Company was already printed when Nelson Doubleday Jr. made the personal deicison to cancel the publication, going so far as to have all copies destroyed in anticipation of legal aciton from the celebrities within it.
Though often referred to as a novel, the book is conceived out of various fragments, not dissimiliar from Burrughs famous 'Cut Up Method'.
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