Renard Press releases George Orwell essay quartet

Renard Press is launching a new series of the essays of George Orwell, focusing on politics, literature and language.  

The series will consist of four titles — Why I Write, Politics and the English Language, The Prevention of Literature, and Politics vs Literature — and is released today (8th January).
 
Commenting on the new series, publisher and press founder Will Dady said: "Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are among the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership.

 "Given the horrific news reaching us from across the pond, we feel it couldn’t be more important to understand the politics at play, and Orwell’s words feel all too relevant today: ‘A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial – that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.’"

The bulk of Orwell's work came out of copyright on 1st January.