One of the most famous writers of all time, George Orwell's life played a huge part in his understanding of the world. A constant critic of power and authority, the roots of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four began to grow in his formative years as a pupil at a strict private school in Eastbourne. His essay Such, Such Were The Joys recounts the ugly realities of the regime to which pupils were subjected in the name of class prejudice, hierarchy and imperial destiny. This graphic novel vividly brings his experiences at school to life. As Orwell earned his place through scholarship rather than wealth, he was picked on by both staff and richer students. The violence of his teachers and the shame he experienced on a daily basis leap from the pages, conjuring up how this harsh world looked through a child's innocent eyes while juxtaposing the mature Orwell's ruminations on what such schooling says about society. Today, as the private school and class system endure, this is a vivid reminder that the world Orwell sought to change is still with us.

Three years after the publication of his much-heralded, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Known World," Edward P. Jones returned with an elegiac, luminous masterpiece, "All Aunt Hagar's Children." In these fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, Jones resurrects the minor characters in his first award-winning story collection, "Lost in the City." The result is vintage Jones: powerful, magisterial tales that showcase his ability to probe the complexities and tenaciousness of the human spirit.

"All Aunt Hagar's Children" is filled with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is the city's ordinary citizens, not its power brokers, who most concern Jones. Here, everyday people who thought the values of the South would sustain them in the North find "that the cohesion born and nurtured in the south would be but memory in less than two generations."

"Blueprints for Building Better Girls "delves into the lives of an eclectic cast of archetypal female characters--from the high school slut to the good girl, the struggling artist to the college party girl, the wife who yearns for a child to the reluctant mother--mapping America's shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day. Its interconnected stories explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell alters how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.

29 stories set in the world of the Matrix, with over eighty pages of never before published material, including four new to print stories. These stories began releasing in the lead up to the release of the original film, back in 1999, entirely online. Right from the beginning, they featured the work of comic book luminaries, including Neil Gaiman, Geof Darrow, Dave Gibbons, Bill Seinkiewicz, and many more. This volume is the first hardcover, and the first to include all the stories under one cover.