avant-garde, speculative tenor. Ballard's experimental stories "delighted" Moorcock: "['The Assassination Weapon'] was exactly what I'd been looking for [...] For me it was exemplary, a flag to wave for authors and readers." Later that same year, New Worlds published the title story-chapter, "The Atrocity Exhibition". Ambit went on to publish "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe" and "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race", also in 1966. Ballard became Ambit's prose editor in 1967. Content and composition The Atrocity Exhibition is split up into sections, similar to the style of William S. Burroughs, a writer whom Ballard admired. Burroughs wrote the preface to the book. Though often called a "novel" by critics, such a definition is disputed, because all its parts had an independent life. "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," for example, had three prior incarnations: in the International Times, in Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry, and as a freestanding booklet from Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton, all in 1968. All 15 pieces had been printed and some even reprinted before The Atrocity Exhibition was published. Each chapter or story is split up into smaller sections, some of them labelled by part of a continuing sentence; Ballard has called these sections "condensed novels". There is no clear beginning or end to the book, and it does not follow any of the conventional novelistic standards: the protagonist changes name with each chapter or story (Talbert, Traven, Travis, Talbot, etc.), just as his role and his visions of the world around him seem to change constantly. (Ballard explains in the 1990 annotated edition that the character's name was inspired by reclusive novelist B. Traven, whose identity is still not known with certainty.) The stories describe how the mass media landscape inadvertently invades and splinters the private mind of the individual. Suffering from a mental breakdown, the protagonist – a doctor at a mental hospital – surrenders to a world of psychosis. Traven tries to make sense of the many public events that dominate his world (the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Space Race, Elizabeth Taylor's much-publicized tracheotomy, and especially the assassination of John F. Kennedy), by restaging them in ways that, to his psychotic mind, gives them a more personal meaning. It is never quite clear how much of the novel "really" takes place, and how much only occurs inside the protagonist's own head. Characters whom he kills