Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative EssaysEssays by the author of 1984 on topics from “remembrances of working in a bookshop [to] recollections of fighting in the Spanish Civil War” (Publishers Weekly). George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist, producing throughout his life an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected—and illuminated—the fraught times in which he lived. “As soon as he began to write something,” comments George Packer in his foreword, “it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge—in short, to think—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 such classics 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 essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex. “Best known for his late-career classics Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell—who used his given name, Eric Blair, in the earliest pieces of this collection aimed at the aficionado as well as the general reader—was above all a polemicist of the first rank. Organized chronologically, from 1931 through the late 1940s, these in-your-face writings showcase the power of this literary form.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review |
Contents
1 | |
Clink | 11 |
A Hanging | 23 |
Shooting an Elephant | 29 |
Bookshop Memories | 38 |
Marrakech | 44 |
My Country Right or Left | 52 |
War time Diary | 59 |
Revenge Is Sour | 184 |
The Case for the Open Fire | 189 |
The Sporting Spirit | 193 |
In Defence of English Cooking | 198 |
A Nice Cup of Tea | 201 |
The Moon Under Water | 205 |
In Front of Your Nose | 209 |
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad | 214 |
England Your England | 109 |
Dear Doktor Goebbels Your British Friends are Feeding Fine | 139 |
Looking Back on the Spanish War | 143 |
As I Please 1 | 167 |
As I Please 2 | 172 |
As I Please 3 | 175 |
As I Please 16 | 180 |
A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray | 219 |
Why I Write | 224 |
How the Poor Die | 232 |
Such Such Were the Joys | 245 |
Notes | 296 |
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