George Orwell's "1984" pops up repeatedly on lists, with the literary classic opening a window into authoritarian regimes. The dystopian novel delves into what it means to live in a state of tyranny, including omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation. Pictured here is a film still from the 1956 movie adaptation of the novel.

Hannah Arendt's essay "The Origins of Totalitarianism," originally published in English in 1951, has also garnered considerable attention. Arendt (1906-1975), who fled Nazi Germany, was one of the first political theorists to analyze how totalitarian political movements rose in the early 20th century. A few weeks ago, online bookseller Amazon briefly ran out of the work.

What college student, or high school student for that matter, hasn't read Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World"? The 1932 novel looks at how society is kept in line through psychological manipulation and conditioning.

Margaret Atwood's feminist dystopia "The Handmaid's Tale" has resurfaced on the nightstands of women participating in political protests, such as at the massive Women's March in Washington in January. The 1985 novel, set in a futuristic New England, looks at the oppression of women in a totalitarian theocracy after the overthrow of the US government. Natasha Richardson starred in a 1990 film.

In 1962, Philip K. Dick's novel "The Man in the High Castle" envisioned how life could have looked in the United States under totalitarian rule by the victorious Nazi Reich and Japanese Empire. A TV series loosely based on the novel was released in 2015. As part of its advertising campaign, a New York subway was controversially covered in the imagery of the show, seen here.

Tom Engelhardt's "The United States of Fear," published in 2011, looks at how fear has fueled massive US investment in the military and national security, only to ultimately gridlock the country.

"Things That Can and Cannot Be Said" is a collection of essays and conversations by Arundhati Roy and John Cusack, who reflect on their talks with NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden in Moscow in 2014. Surveillance and the nature of the state take center stage in these dialogues and texts, as well as the role of symbols, such as flags, amid patriotism.

Vaclav Havel's 1978 essay "The Power of the Powerless" offers a compelling alternative to the current gloom-and-doom outlook. The Czech writer and former president expands on methods of resistance among ordinary citizens and how totalitarian regimes can give birth to dissidents.

Polish poet and Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) became an American citizen in 1970. His non-fiction "The Captive Mind" drew on his experiences as a dissident writer in the Eastern Bloc. It is an intellectual reckoning with the allure of Stalinism and the deadening of the mind through Western consumerism.