Complete short stories

What Hacker News says

1. atombenderSep 2024
   Ballard's fiction is great. I'm partial to the early novels (The Crystal World is one of my favourites) and to his short stories.

   In his longer works, Ballard's ideas often wore a bit thin. In particular, his late novels (Cocaine Nights, etc.) are the longest — beautifully written, sure, but they are essentially reskinned versions of his earlier High-Rise and Running Wild, where he already perfected the motif of humans in gated communities reverting to base, animal, violent behaviour. We didn't really need those; he'd already made his point.

   I do recommend getting his "The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard" (not to be confused with "The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1" and "Volume 2", both of which it supercedes). It includes classics such as "The Concentration City", "Studio 5, The Stars", "A Question of Re-Entry", "Billenium", and "The Garden of Time".

   While I've always enjoyed Ballard's coldly satirical perspective on modern life (The Atrocity Exhibition maybe being the pinnacle of this), I think he's at his best when he gets looser and a bit weird. Nature succumbing to strange mutations feature in The Drowned World, but The Crystal World is absolutely supercharged with hallucinogenic weirdness, a fever dream that turns magical-realist in the end. Later novels touch on this man/nature dichotomy, but not as strongly as his earlier work, although late short stories like "Dream Cargoes" revisit that theme.

   Show morethread
2. blendergasketJun 2011
   Inner Experience by George Bataille The Complete Short Stories by Jorge Luis Borges (especially The Library of Forking Paths; The Library of Babel; Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote and The Aleph) and his essays. Poems by William Blake especially the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Anything by Mircea Eliade (especially the myth of the eternal return, Anything by Frances Yates (especially The Art of Memory (GET THIS BOOK)), the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, the Tao Te Ching, the writings of Chuang Tzu, Currently: Zen Mind, Beginner's mind. Much much more really.
   Show morethread