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Saturday 1/7: Greenlight Bookstore celebrates the grand opening of the store’s second location in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. 632 Flatbush Avenue, 7:30 p.m., free. Camonghne Felix and José Olivarez join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Sunday 1/8: Nancy Hightower, Sarah Perry, Jeremy Freedman, and Linda Harris Dolan join the Sundays at Erv’s reading […]
...moreReleased this May, director Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 sci-fi novel High-Rise converts the dystopian work into a tableau of striking visuals made all the more seductive by the presence of elegant Internet boyfriend du jour Tom Hiddleston. At Electric Literature, Michael Betancourt analyzes the contrasting versions of masculinity presented in the book and […]
...moreIf you could bring one J.G. Ballard novel to a deserted island, what would it be? Although the film adaptations of Crash and the upcoming High-Rise might make those popular choices, Jason Guriel argues that Concrete Island deserves to be your top pick: As speculative fiction goes, this is sophisticated stuff; rather than imagine some […]
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The Rumpus Book Club chats with Rick Moody about his new book Hotels of North America, unreliable narrators, hotel porn, how titles are uncopyrightable, and Internet comment sections.
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Maxwell Neely-Cohen discusses smart teens, furious parents, the apocalypse, and how our screens change how we see the world.
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Publisher of Uncivilized Books and comics artist Tom Kaczynski opens up about primal motifs, utopian thinking, and growing up with comic books in Poland.
...moreThere’s an indispensable book called About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. In the first essay he cobbles together an eclectic list of authors that, ideally, the aspiring writer should read. Because Delany has read everything, you can bet his tastes are wide and varied. And it’s thanks to that book that I discovered Anna Kavan.
...moreRemainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene having a surrealist fit. Or Iris Murdoch as edited by Raymond Carver. But the most apt comparison might be to J.G. Ballard.
...more“He had raised three of us single-handedly following my mother’s premature death when we were five, seven and nine. It was the 60s, when single fathers didn’t do that sort of thing. Most of his friends were sceptical. But he did raise us, as father, mother and much more besides.” At Guardian Books, Bea Balard […]
...moreThe book blogs had a great week — here’s some of what they have to say: This is very cool. Check out The Underground Library, a community in which “books are given out to Members of the Library, who are asked to SIGN their name by the Due Date and PASS the book to someone […]
...moreKafka. Joyce. Woolf. Dickens. Nabokov. All of these writers have become adjectives. (Arguably, “Kafkaesque” is the most overused one of the mix. And “Nabokovian” the least-earned moniker.) Just last April, a prolific and prophetic English writer by the name of J.G. Ballard died. At some point in the cultural multiverse, he too became an adjective […]
...moreAfter eighteen novels and even more short story collections, J. G. Ballard directly approaches autobiography in his latest book Miracles of Life. (Read the London Guardian review here.) Though known for his dystopian science fiction, Ballard analyzes his own life with some surprisingly similar tools, principally Freud. LAWeekly labeled the book a “pre-posthumous memoir” because […]
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