A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novella by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat", which takes its name from the Russian suffix that is equivalent to '-teen' in English. According to Burgess, the novel was a jeu d'esprit written in just three weeks.
Big Brother is a character and symbol in George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party, Ingsoc, wields total power "for its own sake" over the inhabitants. In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens. The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan "Big Brother is watching you": a maxim that is ubiquitously on display throughout the novel.
Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
The Stranger, also published in English as The Outsider, is a 1942 novella written by French author Albert Camus. The first of Camus's novels published in his lifetime, the story follows Meursault, an indifferent settler in French Algeria, who, weeks after his mother's funeral, kills an unnamed Arab man in Algiers. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative before and after the killing.
Eugene Victor Debs was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States.
Different Seasons (1982) is a collection of four Stephen King novellas with a more dramatic bent, rather than the horror fiction for which King is famous. The four novellas are tied together via subtitles that relate to each of the four seasons. The collection is notable for having three out of its four novellas turned into Hollywood films, one of which, The Shawshank Redemption, was nominated for the 1994 Academy Award for Best Picture, and another of which, Stand by Me, was nominated for the 1986 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups is a 1945 novel by C. S. Lewis, the final book in Lewis's theological science fiction Space Trilogy. The events of this novel follow those of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and once again feature the philologist Elwin Ransom. Yet unlike the principal events of those two novels, the story takes place on Earth rather than elsewhere in the Solar System. The story involves an ostensibly scientific institute, the N.I.C.E., which is a front for sinister supernatural forces.
Burmese Days is the first novel by English writer George Orwell, published in 1934. Set in British Burma during the waning days of empire, when Burma was ruled from Delhi as part of British India, the novel serves as "a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj." At the centre of the novel is John Flory, "the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature." The novel describes "both indigenous corruption and imperial bigotry" in a society where, "after all, natives were natives—interesting, no doubt, but finally...an inferior people".
James Follett was an English author and screenwriter. Follett became a full-time fiction writer in 1976, after resigning from contract work as a technical writer for the Ministry of Defence. He wrote over 20 novels, several television plays and many radio dramas.
Franny and Zooey is a book by American author J. D. Salinger which comprises his short story "Franny" and novella Zooey. The two works were published together as a book in 1961, having originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 respectively. The book focuses on siblings Franny and Zooey, the two youngest members of the Glass family, which was a frequent focus of Salinger's writings.
William George Bunter is a fictional schoolboy created by Charles Hamilton using the pen name Frank Richards. He features in stories set at Greyfriars School, a fictional English public school in Kent, originally published in the boys' weekly story paper The Magnet from 1908 to 1940. The character has appeared in novels, on television, in stage plays and in comic strips.
Alex is a fictional character in Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the same name, in which he is played by Malcolm McDowell. In the book, Alex's surname is not stated. In the film, however, Kubrick chose it to be DeLarge, a reference to Alex calling himself The Large in the novel. Later on in the film, two newspaper articles print his name as "Alex Burgess", a reference to Anthony Burgess. In addition to the book and film, Alex was portrayed by Vanessa Claire Smith in the ARK Theatre Company's multimedia adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, directed by Brad Mays.
The Great Train Robbery is a bestselling 1975 historical novel written by Michael Crichton, his third novel under his own name and his thirteenth novel overall. Originally published in the US by Alfred A. Knopf, it was later published by Avon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The novel tells the story of the Great Gold Robbery of 1855, a massive gold heist that takes place on a train travelling through Victorian-era England on 22 May 1855. Most of the book takes place in London. A 1978 film adaptation was written and directed by Crichton.
The Light That Failed is the first novel by the Nobel Prize-winning English author Rudyard Kipling, first published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in January 1891. Most of the novel is set in London, but many important events throughout the story occur in Sudan and Port Said. It follows the life of Dick Heldar, an artist and painter who goes blind, and his unrequited love for his childhood playmate, Maisie.
Donald Michael Thomas was a British poet, translator, novelist, editor, biographer and playwright. His work has been translated into 30 languages.
Gunārs Astra was a Latvian human rights activist and an anti-Soviet dissident who was arrested by the Soviet Union in 1961, and was sentenced to prison for 15 years. He was released in 1976. In 1983, he was arrested again, but released several weeks before his death.
The Third World War and The Third World War: The Untold Story are war novels by General Sir John Hackett, published in 1978 and 1982, by Macmillan in New York and Sidgwick & Jackson in London, respectively. The novels detail a hypothetical World War III waged between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in 1985, written in the style of a non-fiction historical retrospective interspersed with accounts of the conflict from the perspectives of various people.
Why Orwell Matters, released in the UK as Orwell's Victory, is a book-length biographical essay by Christopher Hitchens. In it, the author relates George Orwell's thoughts on and actions in relation to: The British Empire, the Left, the Right, the United States of America, English conventions, feminism, and his controversial list for the British Foreign Office.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian state in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism, and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.
The Furys Chronicle is a sequence of five novels, published between 1935 and 1958, by James Hanley (1897–1985). The main setting is the fictional, northern, English town of Gelton, which is based on Liverpool, where Hanley was born, and involves an Irish Catholic family of seafarers, similar to Hanley's own. The action takes place between 1911 and 1927. The first novel in the series, The Furys, was Hanley's sixth novel.
