Thirty years ago, ecstasy and torment took hold of John Rivers, shocking him out of "half-baked imbecility into something more nearly resembling the human form." He had an affair with the wife of his mentor, Henry Maartens--a pathbreaking physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize, and a figure of blinding brilliance--bringing the couple to ruin. Now, on Christmas Eve while a small grandson sleeps upstairs, John Rivers is moved to set the record straight about the great man and the radiant, elemental creature he married, who viewed the renowned genius through undazzled eyes.

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...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAWAnthony 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.

WITH A FOREWORD BY DAVID LODGEWhen inspiration leads Theodore Gumbril to design a type of pneumatic trouser to ease the discomfort of sedentary life, he decides the time has come to give up teaching and seek his fortune in the metropolis. He soon finds himself caught up in the hedonistic world of his friends Mercaptan, Lypiatt and the thoroughly civilised Myra Viveash, and his burning ambitions begin to lose their urgency...Wickedly funny and deliciously barbed, the novel epitomises the glittering neuroticism of the Twenties.

Aldous Huxley's acclaimed and gripping account of one of the strangest occurrences in historyIn 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.Review"Huxley has reconstructed with skill, learning and horror one of the most appalling incidents in the history of witch-hunting during its seventeenth-century heyday. The Devils of Loudun is fascinating, erudite, and instinct with intellectual vitality" Times Literary Supplement "Huxley's analysis of motive, his exposition of the unconscious causes of behaviour, his exposure of the perversions to which religious emotion is subject, his discursions on the witch cult, on mass hysteria, on sexual eccentricity have the brilliance that all his writing has had from the very beginning" Spectator "One of Huxley's best books" Guardian "His masterpiece, and perhaps the most enjoyable book about spirituality ever written. In telling the grotesque, bawdy and true story of a 17th-century convent of cloistered French nuns who contrived to have a priest they never met burned alive ...Huxley painlessly conveys a wealth of information about mysticism and the unconscious" Washington Post About the AuthorAldous Huxley (1894-1963) is the author of the classic novels Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Devils of Loudun, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles.

All over the English-speaking world critics have greeted these essays with such comments as “brilliant… provocative… magnificent.” Many find that Huxley is the finest essayist since Montaigne. It has been said that “Mr. Huxley is not only a literary giant, but one of the greatest thinkers of our time.” Mr. Huxley’s topic is man, the total compass of his faculties in science, literature, music, religion, art, love, sex, speculative thinking and simple being. Here, displayed to the full, is the astonishing virtuosity of Huxley’s genius. The range of Aldous Huxley’s thinking was astonishing. His opinions on art were as original and well-founded as his discussions of biology or architecture, poetry, music, or history. As a virtuoso of letters, he was unequalled. Born into a famous family with a long intellectual tradition, Huxley attended Eton and Oxford. His reputation as a writer was well-established before he was thirty. Mr. Huxley was not only a master essayist; in 1959 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for “having done the best work of our time in what threatens to be a neglected field, the novel of ideas.” His novels include “Crome Yellow” and “The Genius and the Goddess”.