The Genius and the Goddess

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by Aldous Huxley


  What Are You Going to Do About It?: The Case for Constructive Peace 1936

  Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for Their Realization 1937

  After Many a Summer Dies the Swan 1939

  Gray Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics 1941

  The Art of Seeing 1942

  Time Must Have a Stop 1944

  The Perennial Philosophy 1946

  Science, Liberty and Peace 1946

  Ape and Essence 1948

  The Gioconda Smile 1948

  Themes and Variations 1950

  The Devils of Loudun 1952

  The Doors of Perception 1954

  The Genius and the Goddess 1955

  Heaven and Hell 1956

  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 1956

  Brave New World Revisited 1958

  Island 1962

  Literature and Science 1963

  Have You Read?

  More by Aldous Huxley

  THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION AND HEAVEN AND HELL

  Two classic complete books in which Huxley explores, as only he can, the mind’s remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. These two books became essential for the counterculture during the 1960s and influenced a generation’s perception of life.

  “A challenge is forcibly put, ideas are freshly and prodigally presented.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN

  First published in 1952, The Devils of Loudun is Aldous Huxley’s thrilling account of one of history’s most sensational cases of mass demonic possession. The year 1643: When an entire convent is apparently possessed by the devil, a charismatic priest is accused of being in league with Satan and seducing the nuns—both spiritually and sexually. After a celebrated trial, the priest, Urban Grandier, was burnt at the stake for witchcraft. Here is the gripping true history of Grandier and the nuns of Loudun, as told by one of the master storytellers of the twentieth century.

  “Huxley’s masterpiece and perhaps the most enjoyable book about spirituality ever written. In telling the grotesque, bawdy and true story of a seventeenth-century convent of cloistered French nuns who contrived to have a priest they never met burned alive as a warlock…Huxley painlessly conveys a wealth of information about mysticism and the unconscious.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  EYELESS IN GAZA

  First published in 1936, Eyeless in Gaza is Aldous Huxley’s loosely autobiographical novel of one man’s search for an alternative to the moral disillusionment of the modern world. Anthony Beavis, a cynical libertine Oxford graduate, comes of age in the vacuum left by World War I. His life, loves, and foreign adventures leave him unfulfilled, until a friend inspires Anthony to become a revolutionary in Mexico. Shattered by the experience, Anthony forges a radical new spiritual understanding. Eyeless in Gaza remains one of the finest modern novels, a testament to Huxley’s powers as an artist and thinker.

  “An important book…. Without parallel in our contemporary literature.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

  An inspiring collection of writings drawn from the world’s great religions, edited and commented upon by Huxley with characteristic insight, wit, and passion.

  “It is the masterpiece of all anthologies. As Mr. Huxley has proved before, he can find and frame rare beauty in literature, and here, long before Freud, writers are quoted who combine beauty with proud psychology.”

  —New York Times

  BRAVE NEW WORLD

  The astonishing novel Brave New World, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future—of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Aldous Huxley’s most enduring masterpiece.

  “Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist’s faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers.”

  —Saturday Review of Literature

  “Huxley never went out of style. Something about his work seem[s] to tug at our consciousness…. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle, and Huxley assists us in attaining this valuable glimpse of the obvious, precisely because it was a conclusion that was in many ways unwelcome to him.”

  —Christopher Hitchens

  BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED

  When the novel Brave New World first appeared in 1932, its shocking analysis of a scientific dictatorship seemed a projection into the remote future. Here, in one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Aldous Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy. He scrutinizes threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion, and explains why we have found it virtually impossible to avoid them. Brave New World Revisited is a trenchant plea that humankind should educate itself for freedom before it is too late.

  “It is a frightening experience…to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  ISLAND

  In this, his last novel, Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for a hundred and twenty years, an ideal society has flourished. On the island of Pala—as in the Brave New World—science has helped to advance the founder’s plans. But this time those plans have the goal of freeing each person, not enslaving him. Inevitably this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world—not least because of its vast oil reserves. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked on the island.

  “Island is a welcome and in many ways unique addition to the select company of books—from Plato to now—that have presented, in imaginary terms, a coherent view of what society is not but might be.”

  —New York Times Book Review

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  Copyright

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1955 by Harper & Brothers.

  THE GENIUS AND THE GODDESS. Copyright © 1955 by Aldous Huxley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

  First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2009.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-06-172490-9

  09 10 11 12 13 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  EPub Edition © January 2013 ISBN: 9780062271990

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