Nineteen Eighty-Four: 75th Anniversary

Erich Fromm (Afterword), Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Introduction), and Sandra Newman (Afterword)

Written 75 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever...

This 75th Anniversary Edition includes:
• A New Introduction by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Take My Hand, winner of the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Fiction
• A New Afterword by Sandra Newman, author of Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching...

A startling and haunting novel, 1984 creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.

• Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read •

• ISBN10: 0451524934
• ISBN13: 9780451524935
• Publish Date: 1 July 1950
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 29 January 2010
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Format: Paperback (US Tall Rack)
• Pages: 272
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780451524935

Reviews

[wyvernfriend]

I found this deeply interesting. More for what it says about the human condition than anything else. Through the eyes of one man, Winston Smith, it looks at a society that could have been. A world where thought is controlled, where imagination is fettered, where freedom is a word being excised from the dictionary.

It's set in a future that didn't happed, to a degree. We lack some of the overt signs of a dictatorship but sometimes you have to wonder about some of the hidden dictatorships in our world.

It is an exaggeration, it is a moral fable, but it is on some levels very moving. It made me think about restrictions on speech and thought that flows through our modern world. My husband's constant habit of putting the TV on. How much information a lot of countries want to have about us. Stuff that lingers, stuff that makes 1984 scarier day by day.

[mbtc]

This is one of those books that I wanted to read simply because of how much people talk about it (even today). I finished it this weekend and all I can really say about it, is it's INTENSE. It's a book that needs to be read, but not one that I'd ever want to re-read. A scary look into government control, so well written that at times I would close the book and look around, feeling like I was being watched.