Mortal Coils is a collection of five short fictional pieces written by Aldous Huxley in 1922.
The title uses a phrase from Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1:
- ... To die, to sleep,
- To sleep, perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub,
- For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
- When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
- Must give us pause ...
The stories all concern themselves with some sort of trouble, normally of an amorous nature, and often ending with disappointment.
The stories
- "The Gioconda Smile" is a mixture of social satire and murder story,[1] which Huxley later adapted into a 1947 film called A Woman's Vengeance.[2][3]
- "Permutations Among the Nightingales" is a play concerning the amorous problems encountered by various patrons of a hotel.
- "The Tillotson Banquet" tells of 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 his novel Crome Yellow.
References
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| Novels | |
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| Short stories |
- "Happily Ever After"
- "Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers"
- "Cynthia"
- "The Bookshop"
- "The Death of Lully"
- "Sir Hercules"
- "The Gioconda Smile"
- "The Tillotson Banquet"
- "Green Tunnels"
- "Nuns at Luncheon"
- "Little Mexican"
- "Hubert and Minnie"
- "Fard"
- "The Portrait"
- "Young Archimedes"
- "Half Holiday"
- "The Monocle"
- "Fairy Godmother"
- "Chawdron"
- "The Rest Cure"
- "The Claxtons"
- "After the Fireworks"
- "Jacob's Hands: A Fable" (published 1997) co-written with Christopher Isherwood
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| Short story collections | |
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| Poetry |
- The Burning Wheel (1916)
- Jonah (1917)
- The Defeat of Youth (1918)
- Leda (1920)
- Arabia Infelix (1929)
- The Cicadias and Other Poems (1931)
- Collected Poetry (1971)
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| Travel writing | |
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| Essay collections |
- On the Margin (1923)
- Essays New and Old (1926)
- Proper Studies (1927)
- Do What You Will (1929)
- Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
- Music at Night (1931)
- Texts and Pretexts (1932)
- The Olive Tree (1936)
- Ends and Means (1937)
- Words and their Meanings (1940)
- Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
- Themes and Variations (1950)
- The Doors of Perception (1954)
- Adonis and the Alphabet (US title: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) (1956)
- Heaven and Hell (1956)
- Collected Essays (1958)
- Brave New World Revisited (1958)
- Literature and Science (1963)
- The Human Situation: 1959 Lectures at Santa Barbara (1977)
- Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1999)
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| Screenplays | |
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| Non-fiction | |
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| Plays |
- The Discovery (based on Frances Sheridan) (1924)
- The World of Light (1931)
- The Gioconda Smile (adapted from the original in Mortal Coils) (1948)
- The Genius and the Goddess (play version, with Betty Wendel) (1957)
- The Ambassador of Captripedia (1965)
- Now More Than Ever (1997)
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| Children's books | |
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| Other books | |
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