Here’s an excerpt from Thomas Pynchon’s introduction to the new edition of Orwell’s 1984.
It’s a classy essay (how incomplete it is I don’t know, excerpted as it is) and fraught with glorious textual fragmentables:
What was “disgusting rubbish” back in a more insulated time has become, by the postwar era, part of the vernacular of political education, and by 1984 in Oceania it will be institutionalised. Yet Orwell cannot, like the average pulp writer, enjoy the luxury of unreflectively insulting the flesh and spirit of any character.
Though, I still liked Mason and Dixon better…