Dali

New York: Ballantine Books, 1974. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Good. Unpaginated (approximately 100 pages. Color Illustrations. Cover has wear, tears and soiling. Introduction by J. G. Ballard. Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (11 May 1904 - 23 January 1989), known professionally as Salvador Dalí, was a prominent Spanish surrealist artist born in Figueres, Catalonia.Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media. Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors. Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics. James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 - 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Born in an international settlement in Shanghai to British parents before his family emigrated to the UK, Ballard began writing in the 1950s, becoming associated with the New Wave of science fiction with post-apocalyptic novels such as The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and The Drowned World (1962). In the late 1960s, he produced a variety of experimental short stories (or "condensed novels"), such as those collected in the controversial The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). In the mid 1970s, Ballard published several novels, among them the highly controversial Crash (1973), a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism, and High-Rise (1975), a depiction of a luxury apartment building's descent into violent chaos. Much of Ballard's fiction would prove thematically and stylistically provocative.