Flamingo modern classics

22 total works

Crome Yellow

by Aldous Huxley

Published 1 January 1921

On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive HISTORY OF CROME. Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, CROME YELLOW is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "is too irnonic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony."

Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

Published 12 December 1932

This volume is part of a new series of novels, plays and stories at GCSE/Key Stage 4 level, designed to meet the needs of the National Curriculum syllabus. Each text includes an introduction, pre-reading activities, notes and coursework activities. Also provided is a section on the process of writing, often compiled by the author. Into the neatly programmed "Brave New World" of test-tube babies and drug-controlled happiness, misfit Bernard Marx brings the innocent Savage. Huxley's vision of the future is also a chilling comment on the present.

The Doors of Perception

by Aldous Huxley

Published 15 August 1958

In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, he took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the folds in his grey flannel trousers, was transformed. "Red books like rubies, emerald books, books of agate and aquamarien. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence." Huxley described his new "sacramental vision of reality" and the liberating potential of hallucinogenic drugs in his 1954 essay, "The Doors of Perception" and its 1956 sequel, "Heaven and Hell". These writings were crucial to the brave new dawn of the psychedelic 1960s.

Island

by Aldous Huxley

Published December 1962

For over a hundred years the Pacific island of Pala has been the scene of a unique experiment in civilisation. Its inhabitants live in a society where western science has been brought together with Eastern philosophy to create a paradise on earth. When cynical journalist, Will Farnaby, arrives to research potential oil reserves on Pala, he quickly falls in love with the way of life on the island. Soon the need to complete his mission becomes an intolerable burden and he must make a difficult choice.

In counterpoint to Brave New World and Ape and Essence, in Island Huxley gives us his vision of utopia.

WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAW

Point Counter Point

by Aldous Huxley

Published 1 September 1939

One of Huxley's masterpieces one of the Modern Library's "100 Best Works of the Century."

Ape and Essence

by Aldous Huxley

Published August 1967

When Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first appeared in 1932, it presented in terms of purest fantasy a society bent on self-destruction. Few of its outraged critics anticipated the onset of another world war with its Holocaust and atomic ruin. In 1948, seeing that the probable shape of his anti-utopia had been altered inevitably by the facts of history, Huxley wrote Ape and Essence. In this savage novel, using the form of a film scenario, he transports us to the year 2108. The setting is Los Angeles where a "rediscovery expedition" from New Zealand is trying to make sense of what is left. From chief botanist Alfred Poole we learn, to our dismay, about the twenty-second-century way of life. "It was inevitable that Mr. Huxley should have written this book: one could almost have seen it since Hiroshima is the necessary sequel to Brave New World."-Alfred Kazin. "The book has a certain awesome impressiveness; its sheer intractable bitterness cannot but affect the reader."-Time.

Moksha

by Aldous Huxley

Published July 1980

This is a collection of Huxley's writings taken largely from the last decade of his life. He explores the brave new dawn of the psychedelic mind-altering drugs, mescalin and LSD. He discusses their political, medical and ethical implications and describes his own experience of them, in the fulness of life and at the hour of his death. These accounts, amplified and interpreted by his wife and others who knew him, tell the story of a great writer's personal journey down the elusive path to the ineffable.

The Devils of Loudun

by Aldous Huxley

Published 19 March 1970

Urbain Grandier, parson of the French town of Loudun, was tortured and burned at the stake in 1634. He was accused of being in league with the Devil and seducing an entire convent of nuns, in what is the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Charming, handsome, dandyish and promiscuous, as soon as Grandier arrived in Loudun it became clear that he took more than a pastoral interest in his female parishioners. His reputation for arousing extraordinary sexual passions in the townswomen spread to the Prioress of the local convent, Sister Jeanne, who became obsessed with the "delicious monster". Soon all the nuns were gripped by fits and convulsions, falling into frenzied orgies of lustful depravity that attracted tourists from all over France. But was Grandier really the sorcerer responsible for their possession, or was it a political frame-up from Cardinal Richelieu down, to get this arrogant, womanizing priest out of the way? Aldous Huxley's account, which was made into a salacious film by Ken Russell, is full of details of witchcraft, gruesone exorcisms and the superstitions of an age haunted by devils.

Texts and Pretexts

by Aldous Huxley

Published 25 August 1976

The Perennial Philosophy

by Aldous Huxley

Published March 1969

In this reissue, in Huxley's centenary year, he quotes from Chinese Taoists, from followers of Buddha and Mohammed, from the Brahmin scriptures and from Christian mystics such as St John of the Cross to illustrate his belief in a universal truth. Beneath the revelations of all the great world religions, the teachings of the wise and the holy of all faiths and the mystical experiences of every race and age, Huxley believed there was a basic unity of belief which is the closest approximation mankind can make to truth and ultimate reality.

Antic Hay

by Aldous Huxley

Published 1 January 1923

London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed - Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, portrays a world of lost souls madly pursuing both pleasure and meaning. Fake artists, third-rate poets, pompous critics, pseudo-scientists, con-men, bewildered romantics, cock-eyed futurists - all inhabit this world spinning out of control, as wildly comic as it is disturbingly accurate. In a style that ranges from the lyrical to the absurd, and with characters whose identities shift and change as often as their names and appearances, Huxley has here invented a novel that bristles with life and energy, what the New York Times called "a delirium of sense enjoyment!"

Those Barren Leaves

by Aldous Huxley

Published 1 January 1925

"Huxley has never written a richer book." The Nation

Brave New World Revisited

by Aldous Huxley

Published 1 January 1932

Written 27 years after the 1932 publication of "Brave New World", this book addresses the prophecies he made in that work, believing the far-fetched fantasies of his nightmare future to be turning too swiftly into reality. Examining overpopulation, mass communication, big business, centralized government, the effects of television and advertising, this work is Huxley's polemic against modern society.

Eyeless in Gaza

by Aldous Huxley

Published March 1969

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAW

Anthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. His past is haunted by the death of his best friend Brian and by his entanglement with the cynical and manipulative Mary Amberley. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Anthony attempts to find a new way to live. Eyeless in Gaza is considered by many to be Huxley's definitive work of fiction.

After Many a Summer

by Aldous Huxley

Published December 1948

Jo Stoyte is afraid of death. But Stoyte is also a millionaire, and so he pours his riches into scientific research, desperate to find the secret of immortality. This ruthless quest will enmesh everyone around him in a web of greed, seduction, murder and debasement. Written while he was living in California, this is Huxley’s response to Hollywood’s superficiality and obsession with youth, a powerful cautionary tale which employs all his customary wit and merciless insight.

Time Must Have a Stop

by Aldous Huxley

Published December 1953

Sebastian Barnack, a handsome English schoolboy, is on bad terms with his socialist father who disapproves of his hedonistic lifestyle. He escapes to Florence in order to learn about life. His education there, thanks to the contradictory influences of his scurrilous Uncle Eustace and a saintly bookseller, is both sacred and profane. A haunting novel from one of the twentieth century's most powerful commentators.

The Genius and the Goddess

by Aldous Huxley

Published December 1955

It is Christmas Eve, and John Rivers is thinking about the past; about his sheltered upbringing; about an extraordinary time spent as a lab assistant to the great physicist Henry Maartens; about Maartens' beautiful wife, Katy, and about a love affair which shook Rivers to the core and caused him to question everything he once revered.

Brief Candles

by Aldous Huxley

Published August 1965

Music at Night

by Aldous Huxley

Published June 1970

Grey Eminence

by Aldous Huxley

Published December 1941

The life of Father Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's aide, was a monstrous paradox. After a day spent in directing operations on the battlefield Father Joseph would pass the night in prayer, or in composing spiritual guidance for the nuns in his care. He was an aspirant to sainthood, a practising mystic, yet his ruthless exercise of power succeeded in prolonging the Thirty Years War, with all its unspeakable horrors. How a religious man could lead such a life, how an individual could reconcile the seemingly opposing moral systems of religion and politics, was a theme to which Huxley would continuously return.