Word: fiction
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...realms of imaginative fiction, few have been as far "out there" for as long as J.G. Ballard. Yet the disturbing, warped realms conjured up in his 19 novels and myriad short stories have always stood in intriguing contradiction to the engaging, resolutely suburban, rather old-fashioned man who wrote them. At no point in his slim and dignified autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, does Ballard address that mismatch. But just by the telling, his story explains...
...Life deals with Ballard's extraordinary childhood in war-torn Shanghai; the second is spent at the typewriter in the leafy west London suburb where the author has lived for the last 47 years. The journey from one to the other has been central to his life and his fiction. Readers of his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun - and the millions more who saw Steven Spielberg's film version of it - will recognize Ballard's descriptions of the deprivations he suffered at the Lunghua detention camp after the Japanese army overran Shanghai in 1943. They'll recall...
Docking at Southampton in 1946, Ballard found England just as classbound and uptight, and also bombed out and exhausted. He studied medicine at Cambridge, but was impatient for the future already signposted by Freud, the Surrealists and American science fiction. With his wife, Mary - and, in quick succession, three children - Ballard immersed himself in the hands-on family life he craved. After the publication of The Drowned World in 1962, he could afford to stay home, writing more postapocalyptic tales. Then, the following year, Mary died of pneumonia. This loss struck Ballard as a bitter and unexplained crime of nature...
...hope - and fear - that it will retain the unbridled divine power the Old Testament describes. What would such a wonder look like in our postmodern world? What might it do? Parfitt's passionately crafted new theory, like his first, could eventually be proven right. But if so, unlike the fiction in the movies, it would deny us an explosive resolution...
...What is it like being on the Creative Writing faculty at Harvard? CME: It’s very exciting. I am really thrilled to be among fiction writers and poets and other literary types. I am hoping to really build cross-over relationships. I am trying to find ways for my playwrights to see their work on its legs. The strength is that there are so many literary people, the challenge is connecting them to production because playwrights need to see their work on stage. I am hoping to build bridges to see if new plays can become part...