Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays - Hardcover

Orwell, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151013616 ISBN 13: 9780151013616

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008

Synopsis

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—and illuminated—the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. "As soon as he began to write something," comments George Packer in his foreword to this new two-volume collection, "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 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.

About this title

Review:

"The edition is a national treasure" (Michael Shelden Daily Telegraph)

"A scholarly edition of world class" (Bernard Crick New Statesman)

"One of the great triumphs of late 20th-century publishing" (D J Taylor Independent)

"The edition is a wonder" (Bevis Hillier Spectator)

Book Description:

Volume 11 from The Complete Works of George Orwell.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0151013616
• ISBN 13: 9780151013616
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 308