By Aldous Huxley
Afterword by John O'Brien
ISBN: 9781628975680
Publication Date: 1/20/2026
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!"
Praise
“T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is recalled by the casual allusions to classical lore, the devilishly clever garbling of familiar quotations and the total effect of dissolution. Mr. Huxley has the American poet’s flair for topical wit of a distinctly metropolitan flavor. . . . It is a brilliant, entertaining satire, with a faint suggestion of ‘ungestured sadness.’” —New York Times
“There are passages in Antic Hay of a pure and rhythmic beauty: pas sages so fine, so just, that they move one like good music.” —Saturday Review
“Astonishing. . . . A first-rate performance.” —Satyricon
“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.” —Detroit News
“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 com edy and in episodes deliciously strange and tender.” —New Republic
“This new intensity of emotion gives a new savour to the wit which is, after all, what we read Mr. Huxley for.” —New Statesman
Biographical Information
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.