1984
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was the ultimate, the most essential command. Isolated on the island of Jura off the coast of Scotland, suffering from tuberculosis that would soon prove fatal, George Orwell wrote 1984 at a feverish pace, in a race against time, between 1947 and 1948. On December 4, 1948, he sent the completed manuscript to the publishing house Secker and Warburg, and the book was published on June 8, 1949, just seven months before his death. A prime example of political dystopian fiction, 1984 lent to the English language terms that soon became established in everyday speech, inspired films, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, an album by David Bowie, imitations, parodies, and was linked to the most diverse political movements, from the Black Panther movement to the anti-communist Birch Society, interpreted in various ways, banned, and challenged.

From the afterword by Katerina Schina
Animal Farm
All summer long, work on the farm was running like clockwork. The animals were happier than they could ever have imagined. Every mouthful of food was an intense, irrefutable joy, now that the food was truly theirs, produced by them for them, not doled out by a grumbling master. Now that the useless, parasitic human beings were gone, there was more food for everyone. Orwell's moral strength lies not only in his political independence, in condemning with the same vigor and clarity both capitalism and the totalitarianism inherent in every political system, but also in his peculiar innocence, in that almost childlike gaze towards the world that made him see animals and the English countryside with such tenderness and write with such simplicity, a perspective that transcended his pessimism and made him believe “that it is not inevitable for the world to be as it is,” as Christopher Hitchens beautifully writes. In reading him, we see an irresistible face emerging from his pages.

From the afterword by Katerina Schina