Antic Hay

A social satire dissecting morally bankrupt London society just after World War I, from the author of Brave New World.

Like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, 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, and 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, in what The New York Times called "a delirium of sense enjoyment!"

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was an English writer who spent the latter part of his life in the United States. Though best known for Brave New World, he also wrote countless works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and essays. A humanist, pacifist and satirist, he wrote novels and other works that functioned as critiques of social norms and ideals. Aldous Huxley is often considered a leader of modern thought and one of the most important literary and philosophical voices of the 20th century.

John O'Brien (1945-2020) was the founder of the Review of Contemporary Fiction and Dalkey Archive Press, where he published nearly a thousand books in over fifty languages. He held teaching positions at Illinois Benedictine College, the University of Illinois, and the University of Houston-Victoria, among others. He was awarded the Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics' Circle in 2011, and in 2015 was appointed Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts & des Lettres.