Most Popular Books by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel. Borrowing from The Tempest , Huxley imagines a genetically-engineered future where life is pain-free but meaningless. The book heavily influenced George Orwell’s 1984 and science-fiction in general. The novel examines a futuristic society, called the World State, that revolves around science and efficiency. In this society, emotions and individuality are conditioned out of children at a young age, and there are no lasting relationships because “every one belongs to every one else” (a common World State dictum). Huxley begins the novel by thoroughly explaining the scientific and compartmentalized nature of this society, beginning at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where children are created outside the womb and cloned in order to increase the population. The reader is then introduced to the class system of this world, where citizens are sorted as embryos to be of a certain class. The embryos, which exist within tubes and incubators, are provided with differing amounts of chemicals and hormones in order to condition them into predetermined classes. Embryos destined for the higher classes get chemicals to perfect them both physically and mentally, whereas those of the lower classes are altered to be imperfect in those respects. These classes, in order from highest to lowest, are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. The Alphas are bred to be leaders, and the Epsilons are bred to be menial labourers.

Dalam novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley memperkenalkan sebuah dunia baru: dunia kita, beberapa abad di masa depan. Dunia di mana suatu pemerintahan telah berhasil menelusuri akar ketidakbahagiaan manusia, yang bermuara pada tiga hal: keluarga, seni, dan Tuhan. Demi menanggulanginya, bayi kemudian diciptakan dari dalam botol; melalui proses genetika yang canggih ia dihilangkan dari penyakit, dilepaskan dari kecacatan, untuk kemudian terbebas dari derita besar bernama orang tua. Tumbuh besar, mereka hanya belajar apa yang pemerintah ingin mereka pelajari. Maka seni pun dikebiri, menjadi tak lebih sekadar alat hiburan dan propaganda untuk masyarakat. Sementara sains dijadikan buku resep untuk hidangan industri. Konsumerisme diajarkan sebagai jalan hidup yang utama. Kitab suci diharamkan. Kebahagiaan dipusatkan pada dua sumber utama yakni seks bebas dan candu—konsumsinya dilegalkan dan dipantau ketat oleh pemerintah. Melalui cara-cara inilah perkembangan jiwa manusia berusaha diredam, karena apapun yang merangsang jiwa sesungguhnya adalah benih kegusaran yang pada akhirnya bakal menimbulkan ketidakstabilan masyarakat. Dengan melindungi status quo, maka kebahagiaan hakiki, utopia, dapat diraih. Tidak dengan murah memang, namun sekalinya tercapai, sistem sosial tersebut mustahil diruntuhkan. Sebuah tonggak keberhasilan peradaban manusia di depan alam serta Tuhan penciptanya. [Mizan, Bentang Pustaka, Hidup, Dunia, Tuhan, Bumi, Indonesia]

While shipwrecked on the island of Pala, Will Farnaby, a disenchanted journalist, discovers a utopian society that has flourished for the past 120 years. Although he at first disregards the possibility of an ideal society, as Farnaby spends time with the people of Pala his ideas about humanity change. The final novel written by Aldous Huxley, Island was penned as a counterpart to his most famous work Brave New World, which depicted a dystopian society transformed by the momentum of technological and industrial development. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

When Brave New World was first published in 1932 it was regarded as another screwball Science Fiction novel. However, as time as gone on, more and more of the events predicted by this novel have become true and it is now required reading at major universities. In the Brave New World, the classes of people are divided into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. Each class is trained to believe that they are better off than either the people below them or above them. The people at the bottom of the scale are the laborers who do the actual work. To maintain this intelligence disparity, children of lower classes are made less smart through oxygen treatments and chemicals. Parenting and family is nonexistent and such concepts are considered archaic and disdained. All children are born as test tube babies. One fertilized egg will normally produce 96 identical twin children. However, experiments have been done in which as many as 16,000 identical children have been produced. Sex is no longer needed or wanted to produce children. As a result, a man can usually have sexual intercourse with any woman he wants. Just as almost everybody will shake your hand if you stick your hand out, in the Brave New World, almost every woman will have sexual intercourse with you if you ask her.

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

Similar in theme to his most well-known work Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence is a work of dystopian fiction that looks to critique the rise of global warfare in the modern age. Told in two parts, the novel opens in 1948 with the discovery of a screenplay by two movie industry moguls, who then set out on a journey to find the work’s author, William Tallis. The second half of the novel is dedicated to the screenplay itself, launching the reader into a futuristic Los Angeles that has been ravaged by the events of World War III. Vivid in its imagining of a world marked by barbarism and depravity, Ape and Essence offers a sharp critique of the brutal aftermath that war can bring about¬—thus perfectly representing Huxley’s now acclaimed satirical style. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

"This is Mr. Huxley''s best novel for a very long time . . . admirably constructed . . . bright and sun-pierced." New Statesman and Nation

A Hollywood millionaire with a terror of death, whose personal physician happens to be working on a theory of longevity-these are the elements of Aldous Huxley''s caustic and entertaining satire on man''s desire to live indefinitely. With his customary wit and intellectual sophistication, Huxley pursues his characters in their quest for the eternal, finishing on a note of horror. "This is Mr. Huxley''s Hollywood novel, and you might expect it to be fantastic, extravagant, crazy and preposterous. It is all that, and heaven and hell too....It is the kind of novel that he is particularly the master of, where the most extraordinary and fortuitous events are followed by contemplative little essays on the meaning of life....The story is outrageously good."—New York Times. "A highly sensational plot that will keep astonishing you to practically the final sentence."—The New Yorker. "Mr. Huxley''s elegant mockery, his cruel aptness of phrase, the revelations and the ingenious surprises he springs on the reader are those of a master craftsman; Mr. Huxley is at the top of his form." —London Times Literary Supplement.

Aldous Huxley''s acclaimed and gripping account of one of the strangest occurrences in history In 1643 an entire convent in the small French village of Loudun was apparently possessed by the devil. After a sensational and celebrated trial, the convent''s charismatic priest Urban Grandier—accused of spiritually and sexually seducing the nuns in his charge—was convicted of being in league with Satan. Then he was burned at the stake for witchcraft. In this classic work by the legendary Aldous Huxley—a remarkable true story of religious and sexual obsession considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece—a compelling historical event is clarified and brought to vivid life.

From the salons of Oscar Wilde’s decadent London to the modern bohemian radicalism of Bloomsbury, Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza offers us a portrait of early twentieth century England through the lens of Anthony Beavis, a rakish upper-class Englishman whose story loosely parallels that of the author’s own life. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

In these reflections on the relations between art and science, Aldous Huxley attempts to discern the similarities and differences implicit in scientific and literary language, and he offers his opinions on the influence that each discipline exerts upon the other.

A sharply witty novel about social ambitions and artistic pretensions by the author of Brave New World. The widowed Mrs. Aldwinkle will tell anyone who will listen of her love for art, and in a quest to surround herself with her intellectual equals, she invites an entourage to an Italian palace. One guest, who supports his poetry habit by editing a magazine for rabbit fanciers, will become the target of her amorous advances. Another guest will use the opportunity to embark on an affair in order to mine it for literary material, while yet another chases after a vulnerable heiress. A sparkling satire of the cultural elite, Those Barren Leaves is as entertaining and relevant today as when it was originally published. “Extremely clever, with the brilliance we have come to associate with this author.” —The New York Times

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 Huxley''s most enduring masterpiece. Following Brave New World is the nonfiction work Brave New World Revisited, first published in 1958. It is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with the prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.

Antic Hay Aldous Huxley - 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.

Originally published in 1932, Huxley''s terrifying vision of a controlled and emotionless future Utopian society is truly startling in its prediction of modern scientific and cultural phenomena, including test-tube babies and rampant drug abuse.

Crome Yellow Aldous Huxley - Crome Yellow is Aldous Huxley''s first novel, satirizing the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a parody version of Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write. On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabited 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 ironic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony

An inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the "divine reality" common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley "The Perennial Philosophy," Aldous Huxley writes, "may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions." With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine. The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.

Simple Sabotage Field Manual was authored byby The United States Office of Strategic Services and is a must for any student of strategy and sabotage.

Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley, published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a parodic version of Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write.The book contains a brief pre-figuring of Huxley''s later novel, Brave New World. Mr. Scogan, one of the characters, describes an "impersonal generation" of the future that will "take the place of Nature''s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world."

Explains the Bates method for improving one''s eyesight, discusses causes of visual problems, and describes techniques for relaxing and exercising the eyes.

Aldous Huxley is rightly considered a prophetic genius and one of the most important literary and philosophical voices of the 20th Century, and Brave New World is his masterpiece. From the author of The Doors of Perception, Island, and countless other works of fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, and poetry, comes this powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations. Brave New World remains absolutely relevant to this day as both a cautionary dystopian tale in the vein of the George Orwell classic 1984, and as thought-provoking, thoroughly satisfying entertainment.

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out''. Aldous Huxley first took mescalin in 1953 and continued his experiments with hallucinogenic drugs until 1963 when, on his deathbed, he asked for and was given LSD. Huxley explores the effects of the mescalin experience, describing how the drug enabled him to discover a ''sacramental vision of reality''. He also discusses the spiritual and moral implications of the experience, demonstrating how negative emotions can transform man''s perceptual Nirvana into a ''schizophrenic hell''.

Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley. It was published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the witty story of a house party at "Crome" (a lightly veiled reference to Garsington Manor, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write). We hear the history of the house from Henry Wimbush, its owner and self-appointed historian; apocalypse is prophesied, virginity is lost, and inspirational aphorisms are gained in a trance. Our hero, Denis Stone, tries to capture it all in poetry and is disappointed in love.