A paradise where existed no poverty, neuroses, or war, where freedom and enlightenment reigned, is doomed when oil is discovered.

Among the most profound and influential explorations of mind-expanding psychedelic drugs ever written, here are two complete classic books-The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell-in which Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, reveals the mind's remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. This new edition also features an additional essay, "Drugs That Shape Men's Minds," which is now included for the first time.

When Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first appeared in 1932, it presented in terms of purest fantasy a society bent on self-destruction. Few of its outraged critics anticipated the onset of another world war with its Holocaust and atomic ruin. In 1948, seeing that the probable shape of his anti-utopia had been altered inevitably by the facts of history, Huxley wrote Ape and Essence. In this savage novel, using the form of a film scenario, he transports...

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 path breaking 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...

The Doors of Perception is a book by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1954, it details his taking mescaline in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.

In this "brilliantly written" book, the author of Brave New World reflects on his dystopian classic-and its echoes in the real world decades later (Kirkus Reviews). Written almost thirty years after the publication of Aldous Huxley's groundbreaking dystopian novel, Brave New World Revisited compares the "future" of 1958 with his vision of it from the early 1930s. Touching on subjects as diverse as world population, drugs, subliminal suggestion,...

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,...

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...

Though somewhat overshadowed by Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, Huxley's modernist novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is often regarded as his finest work. The writer and historian Simon Heffer dubbed it, unequivocally, 'his only great novel.' The plot centres on Anthony Beavis, a dilettante social theorist, a man inclined to recoil from life. The pleasures of the physical world disgust him and the universe of ideas is but a poor refuge....

Aldous Huxley's and gripping account of one of the strangest occurrences in history. In 1632 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. A remarkable...