Facing Unpleasant Facts »

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.

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. Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men.

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.

contents

Foreword by George Packer • vii

Introduction by George Packer • xv

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

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

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

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

GEORGE ORWELL (1903–1950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.

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.