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Essays

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Essays

By: George Orwell
Narrated by: Alex Hyde-White
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The articles collected in George Orwell’s Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century - a man who elevated political writing to an art. This outstanding collection brings together Orwell’s longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes “My Country Right or Left”, “Decline of the English Murder”, “Shooting an Elephant", and “A Hanging”.

With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defense of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell’s essays created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move, and entertain.

©1984 Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing Essays Nonfiction Witty European World Literature Funny
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What is most fascinating is the unintentional notations into early 1900 history. These essays describe the environments surrounding the topics and a world that has not changed much from a sociological perspective.

Nothing has changed in the world

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Orwell is famous as an essayist, and this collection illustrates why. Except for scattered self-conscious assertions of socialist faith, the text is wonderful -- about boys books, about elite schools in England, about WWII and popular sentiment. It makes you want to write a similar essay, as it plants and feeds despair that you couldn't possibly do it as well. The reader is quite good too.

Insights into life & the world, nicely read.

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Orwell's essays are so thought provoking and enjoyable the context of their time doesn't even matter. He turns reviews of books you haven't read into insightful dialogues on issues as diverse as the role of the writer in an age of totalitarianism to what Tolstoys review of King Lear tells us about the ethics of the man.

A wonderful collection.

Indispensable.

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as the man himself had so many wonderful things to say on such a wide variety of topics... I'm only embarrassed that I too, for many years, stopped after the two aforementioned classics... but at least now I've seen the error if my ways. Orwell is one of those truly great combination writer/polemicist/intellectual who can say something I completely disagree with and yet still have me enthralled to the depths of my being. I'm not one of those people who lives in an echo chamber but still, I am typically hyper aware of my dispute with a writer of their work when I'm reading something, "just to know what the enemy thinks". not to say that I dispute much of what orwell writes--truly finding the second tier of his work has him dangerously close to overtaking Henry Miller as my favorite of all time...

anyway, this collection is complex, concise and complete (obv. not everything complete, but virtually all his important/best/most heralded essays are here in one volume and the narrator is top flight... nowadays when I read Orwell I hear this guys voice in my head as the actual voice of George Orwell himself... so completely does he capture the spirit of Orwell, or at least how I imagine him to be seeing as how he don't walk around no more.)

it's too bad so many people stop at 1984 & A.F.

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Late Orwell continues to get my applause. But wow, what a lot of awful early stuff! I better understand why he was easily dismissed in his day. "Shooting an Elephant " can't overcome the dreariness of Saving England, or the extended commentary on Dickens.

Taught me to appreciate and dislike Orwell

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