Good interview with David Cronenberg in Canada’s Toro Magazine, including a brief exchange on Crash - What happens when you get an actor who says no to a piece of direction? I’ve never had that. There was a problem, wasn’t there, with Elias Koteas doing a gay scene in Crash? Yeah. But he did it. What happened there? I don’t yell [...]

This one has it all — submerged flyovers, apartment dwellers fighting their way to the top floors, oil tankers deposited miles inland like drowned giants, refugee colonies in the 1970s sports arena, urban citizens reduced to Hobbesian looters overnight — too bad it’s nonfiction.

Recently I’ve come across a piece by one of my favorite authors, J. G. Ballard, on a show I’ve become addicted to against my better judgement: Crime Scene Investigation (you can access Ballard’s article here). I was pleased and disappointed by Ballard’s analysis. Although a lot of his comments are...

A JGB-quoting story from the Daily Telegraph, on the ‘news’ that popular glamour model Jordan is to ‘write’ two novels - Several heavyweights of the literary world were impressed to have an unexpected new novelist in their midst. JG Ballard, the veteran author of more than 30 books including Empire of the Sun, said: “I hope she [...]

From the Guardian: Wednesday August 24, 2005 "Keep it brief’: A new £15,000 prize for short stories suggests Britain is finally getting over its obsession with the novel. And not before time, says Aida Edemariam … [William] Boyd identified seven types of short story, beginning with the "event-plot story", one of its earliest forms, [...]

A loon writes...

Not having read much Wilde, I can’t really verify the accuracy of this comparison…but this was in the Seattle Times, 19 Aug 2005: "The late 19th century had Oscar Wilde to challenge its pieties. Our closest equivalent is British novelist J.G. Ballard, iconoclastic author of Crash, High Rise and...

from Empire MagazineTideland, Fast Food Nation And More Exclusive: British producer Jeremy Thomas on his slate 15 August 2005 “At the Locarno Film festival where he picked up the Raimondo Rezzonico independent producer award this week, British indie mogul Jeremy Thomas ran Empire through the...

from the Manchester University Press: "J. G. Ballard� (isbn 0-7190-7053-8) Andrzej Gasiorek This book offers a comprehensive account of the work of J.G. Ballard, regarded by critics as one of the most significant fiction writers of recent times. Ballard’s early science fiction writing earned him...