Antic Hay

by Aldous Huxley Narrated by Simon Vance

Overview

Theodore Gumbril, a mild young Oxford tutor, has become thoroughly dismayed by the formality of college life and the staid British institutions of learning. An impetuous need for celebration, even rebellion, possesses him. He and his bohemian companions embark on wild and daring bacchanalian adventures that steer them resolutely away from stifling conventions of behavior, charging them for the first time with an exuberant vitality and lust for life.

A sardonic and outspoken novel, Antic Hay unfolds its polemical theme against the backdrop of London's postwar nihilistic bohemia. This is Huxley at his biting, brilliant best-a novel charged with excitement and loud with satiric laughter at conventional morality and stuffy people everywhere.

Editorial Reviews

New Statesman

This new intensity of emotion gives a new savour to the wit which is, after all, what we read Mr. Huxley for.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Long out of print, this minor modernist classic satirizes Huxley's illustrious circle in the years after World War I. (Apr.)

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.--Jo Carr, Sarasota, FL Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile

[Vance’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.”

New Republic 

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.”

Nation

Aldous Huxley was the most able of satirists...and it is the essential seriousness of his mind, his real concern with the world which gives him his strength.”

Saturday 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.”

New York Times

A cry for madder music and for stronger wine.”

From the Publisher

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

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169551006
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	09/28/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

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