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This book is a comprehensive collection of extracts of Jean Baudrillard’s myriad published writings. The extracts extend, in order of original publication in French, from the 1960s right up to the mid-2000s, shortly before Baudrillard died from cancer in 2007. The book has a critical introduction on the importance of the whole of Baudrillard’s ouevre and a further reading guide to Jean Baudrillard the person, and his entire life and work. Each of the extracts is preceded by a short, snappy editorial introduction setting the scene. The book is aimed at readers new to Baudrillard as well as experts in the field.

Is it possible that various disciplines, theorists and cultural commentators have been hurtling down a blind alley in the last thirty years, searching for the holy grail of the postmodern? What if, after all, we have never have been postmodern? Or what if we are, instead, now living ‘after postmodernity’? As global culture rushes off the cliff of catastrophe with its neo-liberal, neo-conservative ideologies mangled in the process, this book provides theory at the speed of light designed to capture the fast flickering images of the real, gone before you can blink in today's accelerated culture. It sets out a variety of reasons why we should move away from seeing the recent era as ‘postmodern’ and our culture as ‘postmodernist’ through a series of analyses of contemporary culture; highlights key theorists, such as Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard, who, despite the pitfalls of their work, chart a new route map out of the trajectories of the catastrophic; envisages a new object of knowledge for the contemporary world — mobile accelerated nonpostmodern culture (MANC); and provides some of the building blocks and conceptual resources for a ‘claustropolitan sociology’ of the global future in order to better understand the catastrophic present, where claustropolis is rapidly replacing cosmopolis.