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Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays
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Author:
Orwell, George
Editor:
Packer, George
Series:
Before Orwell
Published:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009
Status:
Checked Out
Description

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.

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Subjects
Subjects
Literary Criticism
Nonfiction
More Details
Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
10/14/2009
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780547417769
ASIN:
B0047747T2
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

George Orwell. (2009). Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

George Orwell. 2009. Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

MLA Citation (style guide)

George Orwell. Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 18:15:50
Date Updated:
Dec 08, 2020 05:50:52
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Apr 21, 2024 09:51:05
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Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
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        GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.

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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.

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        Starred review from August 25, 2008
        In editing these two volumes, George Packer reminds us that the author of the novel 1984 wrote brilliant essays.
        Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays
        George Orwell
        , compiled and with an intro. by George Packer. Harcourt
        , $25 (336p) ISBN 978-0-15-101361-6

        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. The range of subjects is considerable, from “Shooting an Elephant” to remembrances of working in a bookshop (“The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence...”); from recollections of fighting in the Spanish Civil War to culinary oddities such as a “Defence of English Cooking” and “A Nice Cup of Tea”; to the broad-stroke masterwork of boarding-school irony, “Such, Such Were the Joys.” New Yorker contributor Packer (The Assassins’ Gate
        ) keenly assembles and introduces this selection, bringing into high relief Orwell’s range of experience and committed humanism, showing how, as Orwell put it, “to make political writing into an art.”

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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.

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