About the Author

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai. After internment in a civilian prison camp, his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller ‘Empire of the Sun’ won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His controversial novel ‘Crash’ was made into a film by David Cronenberg. His autobiography ‘Miracles of Life’ was published in 2008, and a collection of interviews with the author, ‘Extreme Metaphors’, was published in 2012. J. G. Ballard passed away in 2009.

Reviews

A respected figure in contemporary fiction, Ballard is best known for his novels (most recently Crash, on which a film just honored at Cannes was based). This nonfiction collection, however, features the reviews and essays Ballard has written over the last 30 years, commenting on public figures as diverse as Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, and Nancy Reagan. Noteworthy are his reviews and comments on science fiction and surrealism, subjects he examines with considerable enthusiasm and knowledge. While his reviews offer pungent insights into the preoccupations and paranoia of the late 20th century, the autobiographical essays recounting Ballard's early years in China are especially compelling. Born in Shanghai in 1930, he spent four years interned in a Japanese prison camp, an experience he writes of eloquently, strongly defending the American decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (His novel Empire of the Sun, which Steven Speilberg made into a film, covers the same territory.) This thought-provoking, informative, and entertaining book is recommended for all libraries.‘Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo, N.Y.

Ballard, the British novelist best known for Empire of the Sun, has also done a considerable amount of movie and book reviewing, as well as assorted hackwork, mostly for British newspapers, and this collection is a representative selection. His pieces display a crisp style, an offbeat affection for some of the trappings of contemporary life-such as superhighways, shopping centers, high-rise hotels-usually scorned by literary folk, and an abiding passion for science fiction (of which Ballard himself is a skilled practitioner). He is excellent on SF movies (there are not nearly enough of his cogent reviews of these here), but he is less interesting, being perhaps less involved, in writing about the visual arts. His book reviews are a highly eclectic lot, displaying great enthusiasm for William S. Burroughs, Nathanael West and Henry Miller. The real problem with this collection, apart from its lack of focus, is that Ballard the essayist is not nearly as compelling as Ballard the creative writer. (May)