OTB eBook publishing

Antic Hay is one of Aldous Huxley's earlier novels, and like them is primarily a novel of ideas involving conversations that disclose viewpoints rather than establish characters; its polemical theme unfolds against the backdrop of London's post-war nihilistic Bohemia. This is Huxley at his biting, brilliant best, a novel, loud with derisive laughter, which satirically scoffs at all conventional morality and at stuffy people everywhere, a novel that's always charged with excitement.

Mortal Coils is a collection of five short fictional pieces written by Aldous Huxley in 1921. 'The Gioconda Smile' is a mixture of social satire and murder story, which Huxley later adapted into a film called A Woman's Vengeance (1948). 'Permutations Among the Nightingales' is a play concerning the amorous problems encountered by various patrons of a hotel. 'The Tillotson Banquet' tells of an old artist who was thought to be dead, and is 'rediscovered'; a not entirely successful honorary dinner is organised for him. 'Green Tunnels' is about the boredom of a young girl on holiday with her family. She develops a romantic fantasy, and is ultimately disillusioned. 'Nuns at Luncheon' is a second-hand story told of a nun falling in love. The story mocks the writer's process, a concept Huxley used in his novel Crome Yellow.

Excerpt: 'From Bocca di Magra to Bocca d'Arno, mile after mile, the sandy beaches smoothly, unbrokenly extend. Inland from the beach, behind a sheltering belt of pines, lies a strip of coastal plain-flat as a slice of Holland and dyked with slow streams. Corn grows here and the vine, with plantations of slim poplars interspersed, and fat water-meadows. Here and there the streams brim over into shallow lakes, whose shores are fringed with sodden fields of rice. And behind this strip of plain, four or five miles from the sea, the mountains rise, suddenly and steeply: the Apuan Alps. Their highest crests are of bare limestone, streaked here and there with the white marble which brings prosperity to the little towns that stand at their feet: Massa and Carrara, Serravezza, Pietrasanta. Half the world's tombstones are scooped out of these noble crags. Their lower slopes are grey with olive trees, green 10with woods of chestnut. Over their summits repose the enormous sculptured masses of the clouds.'

These are a really interesting set of poems. Definitely an author one should own all of his works. Such an interesting person. For those of us who have been enamoured by Aldous' later writing, it's quite interesting to come back to the very beginning and do Aldous chronologically. (Goodreads)