Limbo

Limbo Synopsis

Limbo (1920) is a collection of short fiction by English author Aldous Huxley. Mostly satirical, Huxley’s novella, play, and four short stories show a promising writer at the very beginning of his career. In the novella “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow,” Huxley satirizes the lives of his friends and acquaintances at Eton and Oxford. Richard Greenow, a young writer, spends his days as a politically engaged academic. At night, however, he writes fiction for women, crafting stories and serialized novels he sells to a prominent women’s magazine. Finding success, he realizes there is a woman inside him, a writer named Pearl Bellairs who is as much a part of his identity as Richard Greenow is. When war breaks out, however, he must choose between his principled pacifism and his fear of prison, a decision that pits his two unique identities against one another. “Happily Ever After,” a story set during the First World War, follows Peter Jacobsen, “ a man with no nationality and no prejudices,” as he travels across the Atlantic to visit Pemberton, his old friend from Oxford and a renowned scholar of philosophy. As friends and family converge on the stately Petherton home, a classic comedy of manners ensues. Limbo is an early collection of fiction from Aldous Huxley, presaging his satirical and dystopian novels with their abundant wit and unsparing, unmatched ire. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Aldous Huxley’s Limbo is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

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