'Ballard is a magician of the contemporary scene and a literary saboteur. "Rushing to Paradise" is a Wellsian drama of extremity and isolation ... No one else writes with such enchanted clarity or strange power' Guardian
'Pure Ballard. I read it with rapt fascination ... Wonderful' William Boyd
'"Robinson Crusoe" in reverse. Teasing and sardonic ... Ballard at his best' Independent on Sunday
J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.
Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.
