Island (41 page)

Excerpted from
The Doors of Perception
by Aldous Huxley. Reprinted with permission
.

The Complete Aldous Huxley Bibliography

Dates are the year of first publication.

The Burning Wheel
1916

Jonah
1917

The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems
1918

Leda
1920

Limbo: Notes and Essays
1920

Crome Yellow
1921

Mortal Coils: Five Stories
1922

On the Margin
1923

Antic Hay
1923

Little Mexican
1924

Those Barren Leaves
1925

Along the Road: Notes and Essays
1925

Two or Three Graces: Four Stories
1926

Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday (The Diary of a Journey)
1926

Essays Old and New
1926

Proper Studies
1927

Point Counter Point
1928

Do What You Will: Essays
1929

Brief Candles
1930

Vulgarity in Literature and Other Essays: Digressions from a Theme
1930

The World of Light
1931

The Cicadas and Other Poems
1931

Music at Night and Other Essays
1931

Brave New World
1932

Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology of Commentaries
1932

Beyond the Mexique Bay
1934

Eyeless in Gaza
1936

The Olive Tree and Other Essays
1936

What Are You Going to Do About It?: The Case for Constructive Peace
1936

Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for Their Realization
1937

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
1939

Gray Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics
1941

The Art of Seeing
1942

Time Must Have a Stop
1944

The Perennial Philosophy
1946

Science, Liberty and Peace
1946

Ape and Essence
1948

The Gioconda Smile
1948

Themes and Variations
1950

The Devils of Loudun
1952

The Doors of Perception
1954

The Genius and the Goddess
1955

Heaven and Hell
1956

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
1956

Brave New World Revisited
1958

Island
1962

Literature and Science
1963

More by Aldous Huxley

THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION
AND HEAVEN AND HELL

Two classic complete books in which Huxley explores, as only he can, the mind’s remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. These two books became essential for the counterculture during the 1960s and influenced a generation’s perception of life.

“A challenge is forcibly put, ideas are freshly and prodigally presented.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

THE GENIUS AND THE GODDESS

Talking with a friend on Christmas Eve while a small grandson sleeps upstairs, John Rivers is moved to set the record straight about his mentor—the legendary scientific genius in whose home, thirty years before, ecstasy and torment had laid hold of Rivers, shocking him out of “half-baked imbecility into something more nearly resembling the human form.” Fatefully, Rivers had an affair with the famous man’s young wife, bringing the couple to ruin. Now back in print,
The Genius and the Goddess
is Aldous Huxley’s lost novella of the conflict between reason and passion.

“A genius…. A writer who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine.”

—The New Yorker

EYELESS IN GAZA

First published in 1936,
Eyeless in Gaza
is Aldous Huxley’s loosely autobiographical novel of one man’s search for an alternative to the moral disillusionment of the modern world. Anthony Beavis, a cynical libertine Oxford graduate, comes of age in the vacuum left by World War I. His life, loves, and foreign adventures leave him unfulfilled, until a friend inspires Anthony to become a revolutionary in Mexico. Shattered by the experience, Anthony forges a radical new spiritual understanding.
Eyeless in Gaza
remains one of the finest modern novels, a testament to Huxley’s powers as an artist and thinker.

“An important book…. Without parallel in our contemporary literature.”

—New York Times Book Review

THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

An inspiring collection of writings drawn from the world’s great religions, edited and commented upon by Huxley with characteristic insight, wit, and passion.

“It is the masterpiece of all anthologies. As Mr. Huxley has proved before, he can find and frame rare beauty in literature, and here, long before Freud, writers are quoted who combine beauty with proud psychology.”

—New York Times

BRAVE NEW WORLD

The astonishing novel
Brave New World
, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future—of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Aldous Huxley’s most enduring masterpiece.

“Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist’s faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers.”

—Saturday Review of Literature

“Huxley never went out of style. Something about his work seem[s] to tug at our consciousness…. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle, and Huxley assists us in attaining this valuable glimpse of the obvious, precisely because it was a conclusion that was in many ways unwelcome to him.”

—Christopher Hitchens

BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED

When the novel
Brave New World
first appeared in 1932, its shocking analysis of a scientific dictatorship seemed a projection into the remote future. Here, in one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Aldous Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy. He scrutinizes threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion, and explains why we have found it virtually impossible to avoid them.
Brave New World Revisited
is a trenchant plea that humankind should educate itself for freedom before it is too late.

“It is a frightening experience…to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time.”

—New York Times Book Review

THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN

First published in 1952,
The Devils of Loudun
is Aldous Huxley’s thrilling account of one of history’s most sensational cases of mass demonic possession. The year 1643: When an entire convent is apparently possessed by the devil, a charismatic priest is accused of being in league with Satan and seducing the nuns—both spiritually and sexually. After a celebrated trial, the priest, Urban Grandier, was burnt at the stake for witchcraft. Here is the gripping true history of Grandier and the nuns of Loudun, as told by one of the master storytellers of the twentieth century.

“Huxley’s masterpiece and perhaps the most enjoyable book about spirituality ever written. In telling the grotesque, bawdy and true story of a seventeenth-century convent of cloistered French nuns who contrived to have a priest they never met burned alive as a warlock…Huxley painlessly conveys a wealth of information about mysticism and the unconscious.”

—Washington Post Book World