Ballardian

The story of Savoy Books is one of the strangest in publishing history: a tale of lost opportunities, missed opportunities, repression, censorship, imprisonment … and, most importantly, an incredible legacy of work that continues to disturb, challenge and confront. Mike Holliday talks to Savoy co-founder Michael Butterworth about all this and more, including the guidance Butterworth received as a young writer from J.G. Ballard.

Parallels between Ballard’s Kingdom Come and Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

Is Woody Allen a Ballard fan? Lucy Vickery at The Spectator certainly is.

Drawing inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars in 1970, the Crashman presents his own festival of Atrocity films: aviation disasters set to musical soundtracks.

In 1991 Simon Brook made a short film from J.G. Ballard’s obscure 1963 short story, ‘Minus One’. Enjoy this super-rare screening of Simon’s film.

Here are the entries in the 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. Congratulations to the winner, Ben Slater.

Something Awful is currently taking the piss out of ‘cyberia’ and the early days of the internet, looking back to a time when hyperlinks were revolutionary because ‘we don’t have to look at text as linear anymore, because it’s all connected now. Information wants to be free. It wants to rape itself and bear [...]

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
On 14 September 2006 JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London — the evening was presented by Blackwell. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his age [...]

OPENING LINE:
“Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun.”
I have a real soft spot for The Kindness of Women, an autobiographical work that’s loosely described as a sequel to Empire of the Sun. Here, Ballard is honest, self-deprecating and wildly vivid [...]

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).
From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:
The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the [...]

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).
From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; [...]

Here’s another completely random Ballard-referencing quote plucked completely from its context in time and space. It’s from Mr Will Self himself this time, and it’s taken from an interview he did to promote his novel How the Dead Live:
PENGUIN: You don’t belong to any one school, who do you read or admire?
WILL SELF: I do [...]

by Simon Sellars

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition
Ballardian presents an exclusive interview with Jonathan Weiss, director of The Atrocity Exhibition, the film based on the J.G. Ballard collection of ‘condensed novels’.
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NOTE: This is a revised and expanded version of the original interview. The new additions are a reworked introduction, the addition of notes, [...]