3 BRITS A KRAUT AND A YANK (Ballard Sinclair Self Sebald Wright)
Explore the literary minds of Ballard, Self, Sebald & Wright with this curated reading list—featuring Empire of the Sun, Crash, and The Emigrants.
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Crash
by J. G. Ballard
In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.
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Empire of the Sun
by J. G. Ballard
Jim, an eleven-year-old British schoolboy living in Shanghai in 1941, must learn to survive on his own when he is separated from his parents and sent to a Japanese prison camp
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Great Apes
by Will Self
Like Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Great Apes is a strange and twisted tale, a surreal satire on the human condition, and an omen for those who wander too far. After a long night of partying, Simon Dykes, a successful British painter, wakes up to find that his girlfriend has turned into a chimpanzee. In fact, the world Simon once knew has become a planet of apes. Convinced he is still human, Simon is confined to the emergency ward of a hospital and put under the care of Dr. Zack Busner, clinical psychologist, radical psychoanalyst, maverick drug researcher, and media personality. Written with the glittering satiric edge that is Self's hallmark, Great Apes is a hilarious, disturbing, and truly unforgettable novel.
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The Emigrants
by Winfried Georg Sebald
Four narratives weave history and fiction together as refugees from the Holocaust remember their experiences.
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Meditations in Green
by Stephen Wright
Sardonic, searing, seductive and surreal, the award-winning Meditations in Green is regarded by many as the best novel of the Vietnam War. It is a kaleidoscopic collage that whirls about an indelible array of images and characters: perverted Winky, who opted for the army to stay off of welfare; eccentric Payne, who’s obsessed with the film he’s making of the war; bucolic Claypool, who’s irrevocably doomed to a fate worse than death. Just to mention a few. And floating at the center of this psychedelic spin is Spec. 4 James Griffin. In country, Griffin studies the jungle of carpet bomb photos as he fights desperately to keep his grip on reality. And battling addiction stateside after his tour, he studies the green of household plants as he struggles mightily to get his sanity back. With mesmerizing action and Joycean interior monologues, Stephen Wright has created a book that is as much an homage to the darkness of war as it is a testament to the transcendence of art.
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M31
by Stephen Wright
Dash and Dot—husband and wife; self-professed descendants of aliens from the M31 galaxy—are the world’s most in-demand lecturers on the UFO circuit. They live in a decommissioned church in the middle of America, with a radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in the sanctuary. Their children have the run of the house when Dash and Dot are away. When a couple of UFO groupies show up looking for the extraterrestrial duo, they find instead a nuclear family—or rather, a family gone nuclear—whose comically discomforting world resembles our own as much as it does another world altogether.
