Selected Essays

From Chinua Achebe to Toni Morrison and Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion, the Everymans Library Contemporary Classics set is a collection of the finest literature of our time by award-winning and bestselling writers with new introductions and author chronologies.

This set includes one each of the following titles:

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Best of Wodehouse by P. G. Wodehouse

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

Carried Away by Alice Munro

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Collected Stories by Franz Kafka

Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler

Collected Stories by Roald Dahl

Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

The Collected Works by Kahlil Gibran

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories by Dashiell Hammett

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Dubliners by James Joyce

Essays by George Orwell

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Mr. Sampath--The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Drivers Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan

The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt: Khufus Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War by Naguib Mahfouz

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Ulysses by James Joyce

Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing by Evelyn Waugh

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

The Woman Warrior, China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

Zenos Conscience by Italo Svevo

Everymans Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

A generous and varied selection-the only hardcover edition available-of the literary and political writings of one of the greatest essayists of the twentieth century.

Although best known as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell left an even more lastingly significant achievement in his voluminous essays, which dealt with all the great social, political, and literary questions of the day and exemplified an incisive prose style that is still universally admired. Included among the more than 240 essays in this volume are Orwells famous discussion of pacifism, “My Country Right or Left”; his scathingly complicated views on the dirty work of imperialism in “Shooting an Elephant”; and his very firm opinion on how to make “A Nice Cup of Tea.”

In his essays, Orwell elevated political writing to the level of art, and his motivating ideas-his desire for social justice, his belief in universal freedom and equality, and his concern for truth in language-are as enduringly relevant now, a hundred years after his birth, as ever.