Concrete Island gives me the pleasure of placing Ballard on the pretty short list of contemporary fiction writers whose works I expect to give a complete read of. Delillo, Furst, LeCarre, Letham, Vollman, Lehane, Allende.. Trapped after car wreck on a traffic island, out of sight, and injured, below and beside a complex London highway interchange our hero Maitland, creates a little life for himself over the course of a week or so. And as no man is an island.. he makes it with the help of a strange Friday. Thinking of reading DeFoe’s RC again (many years and economics thought experiments ago…) to get some grounding for Ballard’s urban Robinson Crusoe. As a 20 something I tried my self as a poet.. wrote one about animals (Rabbits? maybe under influence of Watership Down) living in highway dividing grass strips. It was terrible. Thanks JGB.