FICTION
Released: March 5, 2012
"Ballard writes brilliantly about the nightmarish underside of modern life, and this novel makes us poignantly aware of the loss of his voice. "
Ballard (1930–2009) creates a world reminiscent of
A Clockwork Orange and
V for Vendetta in this novel of suburban fascism.
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FICTION
Released: July 5, 2011
"Let's hope there's more in the vault."
FICTION
Released: Jan. 1, 2001
"The sleek mystery plot makes this the most accessible, if not exactly the most successful, of Ballard's fictional diatribes against the psychopathology of postmodern capitalist culture."
Lured to a Euro-corporate paradise a stone's throw from Cannes, the husband of the facility's new pediatrician, struck by mysterious doings, gradually discovers that (gasp!) he's in a J.G. Ballard novel.
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FICTION
Released: May 1, 1998
"For all Ballard's air of jaunty abstraction—his tawdry comedie humaine seems to be viewed through the wrong end of a telescope—his prophetic eye for the ties that bind is as sharp and unsparing as ever."
A bristling thriller pastiche from the surrealistic novelist (Rushing to Paradise, 1995, etc.) and peripatetic social observer (A User's Guide to the Millennium, 1996).
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FICTION
Released: May 1, 1995
"Probably Ballard's best and most accessible yet."
Searing, visceral tragicomedy of epic proportions, this novel of a cult leader and her followers on a Pacific island is Ballard's triumphant synthesis of the range of themes that have preoccupied him throughout his career (The Kindness of Women, 1991, etc.).
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FICTION
Released: Oct. 1, 1991
In Empire of the Sun (1984), Ballard turned his searing childhood memories—of prison-camp experiences in WW II Shanghai—into fiercely effective autobiographical fiction.
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FICTION
Released: April 1, 1991
"A notably uneven collection, ranging from mordant commentary and febrile near-brilliance to murky or trite experiments and subterfuges."
FICTION
Released: April 1, 1988
"Still, if rather murky in overall thrust, chapter by chapter this is rich, strange work from a distinctive storyteller: elegantly phrased, vividly imagined, and rescued from portentousness by a deeply ironic tilt."
With unabashed echoes of all the great "river novels," from Huckleberry Finn to Heart of Darkness to The African Queen, Ballard (The Crystal World, Crash, Empire of the Sun) offers here a poetic, stately, oddly half-involving tale—part escape/chase adventure, part symbolic soul-journey.
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FICTION
Released: Nov. 1, 1979
"An audacious book, then, adhering to its chosen purposes with magisterial economy — but strangely dissatisfying and ungrounded."
Ballard has rapidly moved from his early "science fiction" into a label-defying realm where repeated enactments of sex and death appallingly calibrate the dial-faces of our instrument-centered awareness.
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FICTION
Released: Nov. 1, 1974
"Ballard handles this kind of reductive moral fable with incomparable finesse, investing the narrative with savage horror that eats away at banal appearance and reveals the skeleton beneath the skin."
Ballard's newest nightmare fantasy of contemporary society finds hero Robert Maitland marooned on a seemingly deserted traffic island just outside London watching the unconcerned motorists stream by.
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FICTION
Released: May 16, 1965
Dr. Sanders, taking a brief holiday from his duties at an African leprosarium, finds himself caught up in the odd activities surrounding an obscure African port.
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FICTION
Released: Dec. 30, 1988
"Worthwhile, certainly, but more variety would have served this fine writer more justly."
Eight stories, 1962-85, exploring what Ballard views as a grandiose and mesmerizing yet ill-judged and ultimately doomed enterprise: the manned exploration of space.
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