Antic Hay

Antic Hay
by Huxley

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From Library Journal
Although Blackstone is to be commended for rediscovering many older literary classics, these two early Huxley novels might better have been left to rest in peace. Crome Yellow (1921) depicts an aristocratic cast of eccentrics in a British country house who do nothing but talk...and talk.... Antic Way (1923) shifts to a similar group of Bohemians in London who spend hours in elegant restaurants discussing art and philosophy. With so much conversation and so little action, reading these books aloud is unquestionably the best way to dramatize Huxley's brilliant dialog. Robert Whitfield does it full justice and proves that he is now one of the best narrators in the business. Recommended only for Huxley fans.AJo Carr, Sarasota, FL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
This is billed as a "novel of ideas," as opposed to characters, and that poses a special challenge to narrator Robert Whitfield. With no real action to describe, he's forced to use his British accent to keep us interested. He succeeds admirably. Whitfield, like Huxley, doesn't create memorable characters, but we remember them for the ideas they explore. Whitfield's voice is fun to listen to, and he uses that playfulness to complement Huxley's biting, satiric prose. He reads marvelously, pacing the story well and using his firm, deep voice to capture the irony and hypocrisy within the book. This is not one of Huxley's better-known novels, but Whitfield makes it notable. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
"There are passages in Antic Hay of a pure and rhythmic beauty: passages so fine, so just, that they move one like good music." --Saturday Review

Review
"There are passages in Antic Hay of a pure and rhythmic beauty: passages so fine, so just, that they move one like good music." --Saturday Review

Review
"Antic Hay has the literary delights of the intelligence questionnaire, characters who don't talk in conversations but in charades, with satire japing sophistication as well as the more obvious targets, engaging naughtiness narrated for its own sake, rising and falling in broad comedy and in episodes deliciously strange and tender." --New Republic

New Statesman 11-10-23
"This new intensity of emotion gives a new savour to the wit which is, after all, what we read Mr. Huxley for."

New Republic 12-12-23
"Antic Hay has the literary delights of the intelligence questionnaire, characters who don't talk in conversations but in charades, with satire japing sophistication as well as the more obvious targets, engaging naughtiness narrated for its own sake, rising and falling in broad comedy and in episodes deliciously strange and tender."

Detroit News 12-9-23
"[Huxley] is the creator-god of a beautiful new world which is wholly and peculiarly his own and which he peoples with antic folk whose adventures, always keenly intelligent and sparkling with wit, are eloquently and continually amusing."

New York Tribune 12-2-23
"Astonishing. . . . [A] first-rate performance."

New York Times 11-25-23
"There is in [Antic Hay] a delirium of sense enjoyment. . . . Mr. Huxley has the American poet's flair for topical wit of a distinctly metropolitan flavor. . . . Antic Hay is satirical light literature, done with a deft, sure touch. The portraits, or rather travesties, of the characters are the most delightful features. . . . [A]ll of them joyously and maliciously portrayed. . . . It is a brilliant, entertaining satire, with a faint suggestion of 'ungestured sadness.'"

Product Description
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!"

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1923. A satire of post-World War I London intellectuals, the work follows Theodore Gumbril, Jr., the protagonist, and his bohemian friends as they drift aimlessly through their lives in search of happiness. Huxley's witty and allusive narrative style is a strong counterpoint to his nihilistic vision of humanity.

From the Inside Flap

"Futilitarian" best describes the type of desultory, pleasure-seeking intellectual Huxley pinned so mercilessly to the literary map in Antic Hay. Wickedly funny and deliciously barbed, the novel epitomizes the glittering neuroticism of post-First World War London.

About the Author
Considered to be one of the most significant British writers of the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley is the author of a dozen novels, including Time Must Have a Stop, Antic Hay, Crome Yellow, and Those Barren Leaves, all of which are available from Dalkey Archive Press. He also wrote over thirty volumes of poetry, short stories, and essays during his lifetime.

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