Empire of the Sun, French edition, Denoël (1985), with cover art ‘Singapour 1945′ by Ronald Seatle. Thanks to Herve for all cover scans. Interview by Tony Cartano & Maxim Jakubowski. Translation by Dan O’Hara. The following interview, originally titled ‘Le passé compos...

All photography by Simon Sellars. Bizarrely, it has been almost a year since I posted the first part of this photo essay. There are so many loose ends dangling from this site, frayed and incomplete due to the mad scramble to complete my PhD in the latter half of 2008. Now it’s my mission to cl...

Photo: Simon Sellars. Sorry for the long absence — I promised ‘daily updates’, well, that didn’t happen. It’s taken me ages to get my thoughts down about Barcelona and Kosmopolis because the experience was so rich, but contributing factors included jet lag, computer pro...

BALLARD AND THE VICISSITUDES OF TIME by Mike Holliday ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘News from the Sun’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age , Arkham House, 1988). The late 70s and early 80s represent a sort of interregnum in Ballard’s career —...

[In The Atrocity Exhibition] Traven explores what most people would regard as pretty frightening pornographic imagery; he explores with the kind of eye of a forensic pathologist. He treats sexual desire as if it was something stretched out on an autopsy table; he takes a woman’s body and dismantle...

‘VIOLENCE WITHOUT END’: AN INTERVIEW WITH J.G. BALLARD Conducted by Evelyn Finger. Translation by Dan O’Hara. ABOVE: JGB in recent times. Photographer unknown (image courtesy The Terminal Collection). The following interview appeared in the German newspaper Die Zeit in September 20...

We’re all suffocated by the consumer society and its entertainment culture, where everything is an image or imitation of something else. We’re so starved of the real, as we think of it, that we’ll happily watch CCTV footage of motorways, rain-swept precincts and corner shops. J.G. ...

I’m reposting this tribute to Robbe-Grillet, as I have since discovered some more quotes (from Gasiorek, Delville and Severin) that either shine a light on or further obfuscate the Ballard/Robbe-Grillet symbiosis, depending on your perspective (an ambivalence appropriate to both writers, I sup...