J g ballard biography of martin amis
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In 1987, when I was at university studying English literature, Martin Amis came to town for a reading and signing at the student bookstore. He was a literary celebrity, this being an era in which those two words could be juxtaposed without irony, and we undergraduate fans were so numerous that—in my memory, if probably not in actual fact—some of us, finding no chairs available, resorted to sitting cross-legged at his feet, like eager children in a kindergarten class. That would be an unusually swear-filled, scabrous kindergarten class, naturally. Though Amis was there to promote “Einstein’s Monsters,” his very bleak, very scary, very scared book about nuclear weapons, he was at the time best known for his dark comic novel “Money.” That book had been published three years earlier, and was avidly passed around among my peers, to be read between our assignments on Chaucer or Coleridge.
To an English student studying English at an English university—an institution that Amis, too, had attended a generation earlier—Amis exuded a kind of transatlantic glamour, despite being thoroughly English himself. Later that night, I wrote in my diary that, during the Q. & A. session at the bookstore, “Amis had been talking about a New York expression, ‘schmoozing,’ which is like talking bus
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J. G. Ballard
English writer (1930–2009)
J. G. Ballard | |
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Ballard in 1984 | |
| Born | James Graham Ballard (1930-11-15)15 November 1930 Shanghai International Settlement, Republic of China (present-day Shanghai, People's Republic of China) |
| Died | 19 April 2009(2009-04-19) (aged 78) London, England, UK |
| Resting place | Kensal Green Cemetery |
| Occupation | Novelist, satirist, short story writer, essayist |
| Alma mater | King's College, Cambridge Queen Mary University of London[1] |
| Genre | Dystopian fiction Satire Science fiction Transgressive fiction |
| Literary movement | New Wave |
| Notable works | Crash Empire of the Sun High-Rise The Atrocity Exhibition |
| Spouse | Helen Mary Matthews (m. 1955; died 1964) |
| Children | 3, including Bea Ballard |
James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009)[2] was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media.[3] Ballard first became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962). He later
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J.G. Ballard’s “Inner Space” attend to the Trusty Fiction succeed Martin Amis
Abstract
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