I'm reading J. G. Ballard's short story collection, The Terminal Beach, and loving it. He's one of my favorite writers, but I've never read any of his short stories before. "The Drowned Giant" is one of the best stories I've ever read. After this I'll be moving onto The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard which should keep me busy for a while.
Ballard's one of my favorites, too. I recently read
Empire of the Sun, which I'd avoided for years because I associated it with Spielberg, and thought it would be too sentimental or something. Silly me. It's astounding - probably his best that I've read. It really clarifies some of Ballard's apocalyptic obsessions - the guy saw firsthand how fast the world can change, like the flip of a switch, from "normal" to "end of the world".
And of course, it's not sentimental at all, as my favorite passage will illustrate:
[Jim] welcomed the air raids, the noise of the Mustangs as they swept over the camp, the smell of oil and cordite, the deaths of the pilots, even the likelihood of his own death. Despite everything, he knew he was worth nothing. He twisted his Latin primer, trembling with a secret hunger that the war would so eagerly satisfy.
I've just started
The Kindness of Women, which is the sequel to
Empire of the Sun, which tells about the backstory to his weirder, countercultural phase -
Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, etc. I love it.