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As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead. All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary."how to be interesting, line after line."

Table of Contents:

• Charles Dickens
• Boys' Weeklies
• Inside the Whale
• Drama Reviews: The Tempest, The Peaceful Inn
• Film Review: The Great Dictator
• Wells, Hitler and the World State
• The Art of Donald McGill
• No, Not One
• Rudyard Kipling
• T.S. Eliot
• Can Socialists Be Happy?
• Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali
• Propaganda and Demotic Speech
• Raffles and Miss Blandish
• Good Bad Books
• The Prevention of Literature
• Politics and the English Language
• Confessions of a Book Reviewer
• Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels
• Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
• Writers and Leviathan
• Review of The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
• Reflections on Gandhi

Retro Hugo- and Prometheus-winning Novella

As ferociously fresh as it was more than a half century ago, this remarkable allegory of a downtrodden society of overworked, mistreated animals, and their quest to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality is one of the most scathing satires ever published. As we witness the rise and bloody fall of the revolutionary animals, we begin to recognize the seeds of totalitarianism in the most idealistic organization; and in our most charismatic leaders, the souls of our cruelest oppressors.

George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist. From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent.

"Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites classics such as "Shooting an Elephant" with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these narrative essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex.

Contents:

• The Spike
• Clink
• A Hanging
• Shooting an Elephant
• Bookshop Memories
• Marrakech
• My Country Right or Left
• War-time Diary
• England Your England
• Dear Doktor Goebbels - Your British Friends Are Feeding Fine!
• Looking Back on the Spanish War
• As I Please, 1
• As I Please, 2
• As I Please, 3
• As I Please, 16
• Revenge Is Sour
• The Case for the Open Fire
• The Sporting Spirit
• In Defence of English Cooking
• A Nice Cup of Tea
• The Moon Under Water
• In Front of Your Nose
• Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
• A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray
• Why I Write
• How the Poor Die

Thought Police. Big Brother. Orwellian. These words have entered our vocabulary because of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, 1984. The story of one man's nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory, 1984 is a prophetic, haunting tale.

More relevant than ever before, 1984 exposes the worst crimes imaginable-the destruction of truth, freedom, and individuality. With a new forward by Thomas Pynchon.