List $32.95

Written by George Orwell - Audio book performed by Ralph Cosham (Animal Farm) & Simon Prebble (1984) - Unabridged Fiction - 11 RETAIL EDITION CASSETTES

Publisher, Blackstone Audiobooks (May 2007)

NOTE: RETAIL EDITIONS are packaged in attractive, compact cardboard or jewel-case shrink-wrapped boxes, with full-color art.

Animal Farm

“Orwell’s best known work of unrelenting dystopian realism warns against totalitarianism. Reader Richard Brown’s stern, didactic rendering of narrative passages successfully captures Orwell’s hard-bitten cynicism.” —AudioFile

George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture. Animal Farm has been read and reread and quoted so often that we tend to forget who wrote the original words. It is an account of the bold struggle that transforms Mr. Jones' Manor Farm into Animal Farm-a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. Out of their cleverness, the pigs Napoleon, Squealer and Snowball emerge as leaders of the new community in a subtle evolution that bears an insidious familiarity. The climax is the brutal betrayal of the faithful horse Boxer, when totalitarian rule is re-established with the bloodstained postscript to the founding slogan: But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others...

Orwell's succinct, frightening words have been heard since 1946 as unsparingly descriptive of the fate of those who suffer totalitarian regimes. This audio edition of the masterpiece reminds us of Orwell's genius.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, reviewing Animal Farm in The New York Times Book Review, hailed it as "a wise, compassionate and illuminating fable of our times... The steadiness and lucidity of Orwell's merciless wit are reminiscent of Anatole France and even of Swift."

1984

“A wise, compassionate, and illuminating fable of our times….The steadiness and lucidity of Orwell’s merciless wit are reminiscent of Anatole France and even of Swift.” —Arthur M. Schlesinger, New York Times Book Review

The year 1984 has come and gone, yet George Orwell's prophetic nightmare vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of "Negative Utopia"-a startlingly original and powerful novel that creates an imaginary world.

Orwell depicts a gray world dominated by Big Brother and his vast network of agents suffocating freedom in a totalitarian world in which news is manufactured according to the will of the authorities and in which tepid people live tepid lives by rote. Dissidents are tracked down and subjected to such discipline as turns them into willing tools of their masters.

Winston Smith, the hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system where privacy does not exist and where holders of unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or summarily put to death, he knows there is no hope for him. His brief love affair ends in arrest by the Thought Police and when, after nine months of torture, he is released, Winston makes his final submission of his own accord.

Seldom has a book provided a greater wealth of symbols for its age and for the generations to follow, and seldom have literary symbols been invested with such power. "None can deny its power, its hold on the imaginations of whole generations, nor the power of its admonitions, a power that seems to grow rather than lessen with the passage of time." -Walter Cronkite

About the Author: George Orwell (1903 – 1950) was the pen name of an Englishman named Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in Bengal in 1903, educated at Eton, and after service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, returned to Europe to earn his living writing novels and essays. He was essentially a political writer who wrote of his own times, a man of intense feelings and fierce hates. He hated totalitarianism, and served in the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. He was critical of communism but considered himself a Socialist. He hated intellectuals, although he was a literary critic. He hated cant and lying and cruelty in life and in literature. He died at forty-seven of a neglected lung ailment, leaving behind a substantial body of work, a growing reputation for greatness, and the conviction that modern man was inadequate to cope with the demands of history.

About the Performers: Simon Prebble, a British-born performer, is a stage and television actor and veteran narrator of some three hundred audiobooks. As one of AudioFile's "Golden Voices," he has received over twenty Earphones Awards. He lives in New York.

Ralph Cosham, a former British journalist who changed careers to become a voice, screen and stage actor, and has performed in more than one hundred professional theater roles: Several of his narrations have been named "Audio Best of the Year" by Publishers Weekly, and he has been a three-time nominee for the Audie® Award.