A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews

Ballard, J. G.

ISBN 10: 0312144407 / ISBN 13: 9780312144401

Published by St Martins Pr, 1996

Fast & Free Shipping â A well-loved copy with text fully readable and cover pages intact. May display wear such as writing, highlighting, bends, folds or library marks. Still a complete and usable book. Seller Inventory # ZWV.0312144407.A

Synopsis:

Collected for the first time, these are the nonfiction writings of one of this century's most important voices. Among Ballard's subjects are Dali and de Sade, Marilyn Monroe and Nancy Reagan, atom bombs and highways, sex and science fiction.
The pieces - more than ninety in all, written between 1963 and 1995 - exhibit the same sharp vision and sharper prose that has distinguished all of Ballard's fiction. His fascination for and fixation upon this century take him from William Burroughs to Elvis Presley, and through his eyes we see our times more clearly and more pointedly.

Review:

‘Few writers can write with equal facility about Elvis Presley, Norwegian lobsters and Deng Xiaoping. Ballard does so with great flair and energy in this fabulously diverse collection. It crackles with a mandarin diversity of interests, from Winnie-the-Pooh to General Schwarzkopf. As we get closer to the year 2000, Ballard offers an exhilarating account of 20th century mayhem’ Ian Thomson, Independent on Sunday

‘Ballard’s prescience about technological development seems mostrously acute. Like H. G. Wells talking to an audience of the 1900s, he gives an impression not only knowing what the future will be like, but of actually relishing its arrival. As well as the prescience and the clear autobiographer’s eye, we should also value J. G. Ballard for his sense of humour’ D J. Taylor, Independent

‘In a shrinking world increasingly bereft of original imaginations, J. G. Ballard stands alone, a bizarre visionary maverick. Cinema, surrealist painting, crime, the future, madness, sf and China - these a Ballard’s specialist subjects. Best of all in this eccentric, relaxed, always readable collection are his laconic wartime memories, the treasure house he kept locked for forty years’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times.

‘For the reader, pleasure derives largely from coming on the unexpected on every other page, and from randomly discovering new insights into familiar topics, or introductions to unfamiliar ones. Ballard’s cool sardonic gaze, eyeing the absurdities of the late twentieth century through the distancing science-fictional viewfinder, renders tragedy almost amusing’
Times Literary Supplement

Bibliographic Details

Title: A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and...
Publisher: St Martins Pr
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: acceptable