Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G. Ballard 1967-2008 (book #28)

Edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara, the book collects 44 conversations including his first published interview, with George MacBeth in 1967, and one of his last, a 2008 interview with James Naughtie. Other contributors include Eduardo Paolozzi, Jon Savage, Will Self, David Cronenberg, Mark Dery, Richard Kadrey, Iain Sinclair, John Gray, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Toby Litt and Hari Kunzru.

Each interview includes a brief introduction from either Simon Sellars or Dan O’Hara , and the book’s title is taken from a 1984 chat with Thomas Frick, in which Ballard says: 'presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.' Given that, to a certain extent, Ballard gestated his own obsessions in the interview situation before birthing them in his fiction, ‘extreme metaphors’ seemed the perfect title for our collection.

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J. G. Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction. His best-known books are Crash (1973), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984), made into a film by Steven Spielberg.