CROME YELLOW; MORTAL COILS (Timeless Wisdom Collection Book 1082)

This volume contains the first novel ever written by Aldous Huxley (Crome Yellow), and his second collection of short stories (Mortal Coils).

In Crome Yellow , Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a parodic version of Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write.
It contains a brief pre-figuring of Brave New World. The character "Mr. Scogan" describes an "impersonal generation" of the future that will "take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world."

Mortal Coils is a collection of five short stories:
"The Gioconda Smile" a mixture of social satire and murder story.
"Permutations Among the Nightingales", a play concerning the amorous problems encountered by various patrons of a hotel.
"The Tillotson Banquet" is about an old artist who was thought to be dead, and is "rediscovered"; a not entirely successful honorary dinner is organised for him.
"Green Tunnels" is about the boredom of a young girl on holiday with her family. She develops a romantic fantasy, and is ultimately disillusioned.
"Nuns at Luncheon" is a second-hand story told of a nun falling in love. The story mocks the writer's process, a concept Huxley used in "Crome Yellow".