Essays

Penguin Modern Classics

By: George Orwell, Bernard Crick

Narrated by: Ben Arogundade

Length: 24 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

The articles collected in George Orwell's Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century - a man who elevated political writing to an art.

This outstanding collection brings together Orwell's longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes 'My Country Right or Left', 'Decline of the English Murder', 'Shooting an Elephant' and 'A Hanging'. With great originality and wit Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defence of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell's essays created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move and entertain.

This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Bernard Crick.

Public Domain (P)2021 Penguin Audio

ESSAY TITLES

Listeners will find it more convenient to navigate the audiobook if the titles of the essays are given instead of mere serial numbers of chapters. The following is my little effort:
1. Why I Write (1946)
2. The Spike (1931)
3. A Hanging (1931)
4. Shooting an Elephant (1936)
5. Bookshop Memories (1936)
6. Marrakech (1939)
7. Charles Dickens (1940)
8. Boys' Weeklies (1940)
9. Inside the Whale (1940)
10. My Country Right or Left (1940)
11. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941)
12. Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)
13. The Art of Donald McGill (1941)
14. Rudyard Kipling (1942)
15. Looking Back on the Spanish War (1943)
16. WB Yeats (1943)
17. Poetry and the Microphone (1945)
18. In Defence of English Cooking (1945)
19. Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944)
20. Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944)
21. Arthur Koestler (1946)
22. Anti-Semitism in Britain (1945)
23. In Defence of PG Wodehouse (1945)
24. Notes on Nationalism (1945)
25. Good Bad Books (1945)
26. The Sporting Spirit (1945)
27. Nonsense Poetry (1945)
28. The Prevention of Literature (1946)
29. Books v Cigarettes (1946)
30. Decline of the English Murder (1946)
31. Politics and the English Language (1946)
32. Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946)
33. A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray (1946)
34. Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946)
35. Politics v Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels (1946)
36. How the Poor Die (1946)
37. Riding Down from Bangor (1946)
38. Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
39. Such, Such Were the Joys (1952)
40. Writers and Leviathan (1948)
41. Reflections on Gandhi (1949)