Brilliant book cover design for Orwell's 1984 Jan 05 2013
A new series of George Orwell's books are being published by Penguin and this is the cover for 1984:
Cover design by David Pearson...more covers from the same series here. (via @torrez)
kottke.org posts about George Orwell
Original NY Times review of Orwell's 1984 Dec 15 2011
Published just a few days after what would become George Orwell's most well-known novel in 1949, here's what the New York Times had to say about Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In the excesses of satire one may take a certain comfort. They provide a distance from the human condition as we meet it in our daily life that preserves our habitual refuge in sloth or blindness or self-righteousness. Mr. Orwell's earlier book, Animal Farm, is such a work. Its characters are animals, and its content is therefore fabulous, and its horror, shading into comedy, remains in the generalized realm of intellect, from which our feelings need fear no onslaught. But ''Nineteen Eighty-four'' is a work of pure horror, and its horror is crushingly immediate.
Re-reading Animal Farm Apr 27 2010
In a re-read of Orwell's Animal Farm, Christopher Hitchens notices that there's no Lenin pig.
The social forces represented by different animals are easily recognisable -- Boxer the noble horse as the embodiment of the working class, Moses the raven as the Russian Orthodox church -- as are the identifiable individuals played by different pigs. The rivalry between Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky) ends with Snowball's exile and the subsequent attempt to erase him from the memory of the farm. Stalin had the exiled Trotsky murdered in Mexico less than three years before Orwell began work on the book.
