Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

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HMH, Oct 14, 2009 - Literary Collections - 336 pages
Essays 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

The Spike
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
Copyright

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About the author (2009)

George Orwell (1903–1950) was born in India and served with the Imperial Police in Burma before joining the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was the author of six novels as well as numerous essays and nonfiction works.

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