Orwell's classic dystopian fiction warns us of our future, and deals with issues that speak to multiple dangers faced by many nations today.
Winston Smith is a member of 'the party' and subject to constant surveillance by the eyes of Big Brother, th... View details
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors ...
Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to pas... View details
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRALLONDONHATCHERY ANDCONDITIONINGCENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABIL...
Under the feckless husbandry of Mr Jones, the Manor Farm has fallen into disrepair. Pushed into hardship, the animals decide to stage a revolt, and, led by two young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, they overthrow Mr Jones and drive him away from the far... View details
Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side he lurched ...
"Shriver is brilliant on the novel shock that is hunger. . . . With honesty, precision and humour, she conveys all the boredom and exhilaration of weight loss, along with its tendency to threaten the people around you." -Guardian
From the New York T... View details
I have to wonder whether any of the true highlights of my fortysome years have had to do with food. I don’t mean celebratory dinners, good fellowship; I mean salivation, mastication, and peristalsis. ...
A National Review Top Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Century
"One of Orwell's very best books and perhaps the best book that exists on the Spanish Civil War."-The New Yorker
In 1936, originally intending merely to report on the Spanish Civil War as... View details
He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or -six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chi...
Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden. Then he met a seventeen-year old gir... View details
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood ...
#1 New York Times bestseller
An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from "the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction" (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss.
In Margaret Atwood's dystopia... View details
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin's page-turning science fiction adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel that became the basis for the tales of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell,... View details
It’s spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild plains out of sight in the distance, the wind is carrying the honeyed yellow pollen of some flower. This sweet pollen dries the lips—you keep run...
Before he authored the dystopian 1984 and the allegorical Animal Farm, George Orwell was a journalist, reporting on England's working class ??-?? an investigation that led him to examine democratic socialism. In the 1930s, the Left Book Club, a socia... View details
There were generally four of us in the bedroom, and a beastly place it was, with that defiled impermanent look of rooms that are not serving their rightful purpose. Years earlier the house had been an...
It's the year 2044 and the real world has become an ugly place.
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia when you can be anything you want to be, ... View details
Gunfire wasn’t uncommon in the stacks, but it still shook me up. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so I decided to kill the remaining hours until dawn by brushing up on a few coi...