Mike Jay is a British author, curator, and cultural historian. He is known for his work on the history of mind-altering drugs.
Journalism Jay writes regularly for the London Review of Books. His articles have also appeared in the New York Review of Books, Aeon, the New Statesman, and the New York Times.
Bibliography
Jay, Mike. Blue Tide: The Search for Soma. New York: Autonomedia, 1999. Jay, Mike. Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century. Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2000. Revised and updated edition, 2011. Jay, Mike. The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness. London: Bantam Press, 2003. Revised and updated edition published as The Influencing Machine: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom (US edition titled A Visionary Madness). Jay, Mike. The Unfortunate Colonel Despard. London: Bantam Press, 2004. Reissued in a revised and updated edition as The Unfortunate Colonel Despard: And the British Revolution That Never Happened. Robinson, 2019. Jay, Mike. The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Revised and retitled edition published as Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025. Jay, Mike. High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture. London: Thames & Hudson, 2010. Jay, Mike. This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016. Published in partnership with the Wellcome Collection for the exhibition Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond. Jay, Mike. Stranger Than Fiction: Essays by Mike Jay. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2018. Jay, Mike. Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Jay, Mike. Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Jay, Mike. Wireheads: An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain. New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming October 2026.
As editor
Jay, Mike, ed. Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader. London: Penguin, 1999.
Jay, Mike, ed. Underworld of the East: Being Eighteen Years' Actual Experiences of the Underworlds, Drug Haunts and Jungles of India, China and Malaya, by James S. Lee. London: Green Magic, 2000. (Originally published London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1935). Jay, Mike, and Michael Neve, eds. 1900: A Fin-de-Siècle Reader. London: Penguin, 1999. Barnett, Richard.Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures. Edited by Mike Jay. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2008.
References