10Oct J.G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands
On our next mailer (which you can sign up for here: https://buff.ly/2JdR06g), we'll be offering a nice J.G. Ballard Vermilion Sands. If you haven't yet read any Ballard, then you should add him to your list. Ballard is as well known for his short stories as for his novels. Vermilion Sands was actually his 10th collection of short stories, but is one of his more collectable collections, in the UK Cape edition, given the tendency for collectors to seek first hardback publications. The other hardback short story collections that are highly-prized are The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (Gollancz, 1963), The Terminal Beach (Gollancz, 1964), The Disaster Area (Cape, 1967) and The Atrocity Exhibition (Cape, 1970). The last one not exactly short stories, sitting somewhere between a fix-up and a collection of linked short stories. In this way Vermilion Sands is very similar, as all the stories a linked by the eponymous surreal desert resort - as much a character in the book as any of the humans.
Cover artists get the jacket are wrong as often as they get it right, often at the behest of the publisher, I might add. Brian Knight, who illustrated the cover (detailed in the picture here) got it spot on though. Shown here is just a section of the full wraparound cover. We haven't uploaded the book yet.