Books by Eric Blair
Puss in Boots: A Retelling of the Grimm's Fairy Tale (My First Classic Story)
by Eric Blair
A retelling of the tale of a clever cat who wins a fortune and the hand of a princess for his master.
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Johnny Appleseed (My First Classic Story)
by Eric Blair
For Johnny Appleseed, nothing is better than a fresh apple. From the East Coast to the West, Johnny roamed the land and planted his trees — and had many adventures in between!
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The Boy Who Cried Wolf: A Retelling of Aesop's Fable (My First Classic Story)
by Eric Blair
In this retelling of the classic Aesop's fable, a bored shepherd boy thinks it's fun to see the villagers run to help him when he cries, "Wolf!" However, the boy is lying. Find out what happens when the villagers no longer believe what the boy says, even when he's telling the truth!
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Paul Bunyan (My First Classic Story)
by Eric Blair
Paul Bunyan is a giant of the Great North Woods. Follow Paul and his big blue ox Babe on some huge adventures.
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Sleeping Beauty: A Retelling of the Grimm's Fairy Tale (My First Classic Story)
by Eric Blair
Enraged at not being invited to the princess's christening, a wicked fairy casts a spell that dooms the princess to sleep for one hundred years.
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The Pied Piper (My First Classic Story)
The Pied Piper pipes a village free of rats, and when the villagers refuse to pay him for the service he pipes away their children as well.
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Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
2021 Facsimile of the 1945 Edition. This is now considered a classic Satire on dictatorship and one of Orwell's most enduring short novels. Fueled by Orwell's intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. When the downtrodden beasts of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master and take over management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. The future, however, is far from certain as the drama plays out in actual events. A cautionary tale.
Reviews
"Animal Farm remains our great satire on the darker face of modern history."-Malcolm Bradbury
"As lucid as glass and quite as sharp...[Animal Farm] has the double meaning, the sharp edge, and the lucidity of Swift."-Atlantic Monthly
"A wise, compassionate, and illuminating fable for our times."-The New York Times
"Orwell has worked out his theme with a simplicity, a wit, and a dryness that are close to La Fontaine and Gay, and has written in a prose so plain and spare, so admirably proportioned to his purpose, that Animal Farm even seems very creditable if we compare it with Voltaire and Swift."-Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker
"Orwell's satire here is amply broad, cleverly conceived, and delightfully written."-San Francisco Chronicle
"The book for everyone and Everyman, its brightness undimmed."-Ruth Rendell
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Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
A special large-format edition of George Orwell's classic, illustrated in full color by legendary gonzo artist Ralph Steadman
“Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”—The New Yorker
In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
Lionel Trilling said of Orwell’s masterpiece “1984 is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present.” Though the year 1984 now exists in the past, Orwell’s novel remains an urgent call for the individual willing to speak truth to power.
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Homage to Catalonia
In 1936 Orwell went to Spain to report on the Civil War and instead joined the fight against the Fascists. This famous account describes the war and Orwell’s experiences. Introduction by Lionel Trilling.
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Homage to Catalonia
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 a journalist, George Orwell found himself embroiled as a participant—as a member of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity. Fighting against the Fascists, he described in painfully vivid and occasionally comic detail life in the trenches—with a “democratic army” composed of men with no ranks, no titles, and often no weapons—and his near fatal wounding. As the politics became tangled, Orwell was pulled into a heartbreaking conflict between his own personal ideals and the complicated realities of political power struggles.
Considered one of the finest works by a man V. S. Pritchett called “the wintry conscience of a generation,” Homage to Catalonia is both Orwell’s memoir of his experiences at the front and his tribute to those who died in what he called a fight for common decency. This edition features a new foreword by Adam Hochschild placing the war in greater context and discussing the evolution of Orwell’s views on the Spanish Civil War.
“No one except George Orwell . . . made the violence and self-dramatization of Spain so burning and terrible.”— Alfred Kazin, New York Times
“A wise book, one that once read will never be forgotten.”—Chicago Sunday Tribune
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Homage to Catalonia
Reprint Edition of the 1938 Edition. Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the Republican army. Published in 1938 (about a year before the war ended) with little commercial success, it gained more attention in the 1950s following the success of Orwell's better-known works Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Covering the period between December 1936 and June 1937, Orwell recounts Catalonia's revolutionary fervor during his training in Barcelona, his boredom on the front lines in Aragon, his involvement in the May Days conflict back in Barcelona on leave, his getting shot in the throat back on the front lines, and his escape to France after the Republican Army was declared an illegal organization.
The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."
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