Are you too hardcore for the current state of American letters? The tragic truth is that most new books seem afraid to shock, experiment, offend, get weird. Is there still a place in this world for the freaky girlies? The answer is yes. Morgan and Enzo are two booksellers at McNally Jackson Seaport who delight in the decadent, the debased, and the degenerate. Now, they open their private reading circle to the last libertines in New York. This won’t be a cozy time by the fireplace. We don’t talk to Reese Witherspoon. We don’t know Oprah. This is Batshit Book Club, and baby, there will be no seatbelts.

This month we’ll discuss J.G. Ballard’s shocking blend of violence, transgression, and eroticism, Crash.

“In Ballard the dystopia is not hidden under anything. Nor is it (as with so many fictional dystopias) a vision of the future. It is not the subtext. It is the text….”—Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books

“The last great English avatar of the avant-garde.”—Will Self

When J. G. Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of autoerotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash—a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant, and iconic celebrity.

First published in 1973, Crash remains one of the most shocking novels of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg.