Selected Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

E. M. Forster, perhaps the finest British novelist of the early 20th century, here tried his hand at the short story, and to some extent these 12 works do feel more like experiments than polished masterpieces. But there are some real gems. "The Story of a Panic", "Other Kingdom", "The Road from Colonus", and "The Story of the Siren" are marvelous in the way they blend a critique of Edwardian conventionality with an evocation of the ancient force of nature, as refracted through myth. The result is a kind of proto–magic realism that gets you wondering again about the unseen presence of primary and secondary divinities. Another story, "The Machine Stops", is a work of science fiction set in the distant future that, quite astoundingly for show more 1909, anticipates the kind of global interconnectedness we know today as the Internet – and the ensuing loss of intimate connection; this was the era when the great inventions of the day were the telephone and the airplane, and Forster extends these new conveniences quite convincingly to build a world where people live in dread of personal contact both with each other and with nature. The final story, "The Eternal Moment", is, I think, a real masterpiece. The only work in this collection that lacks any element of fantasy, it is closest to the Forster we know from the novels. Its central character, a novelist named Miss Raby whose book has turned a quiet Alpine village into a tourist mecca, is a brilliant study: she is both naive and self-aware, both wise and helpless. Forster's presentation of the mixed effects of tourism on a once-peaceful town is also prescient. The other stories here, usually of just a few pages, are generally amusing allegories or whimsical looks at the afterlife. The introduction by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell is helpful in bringing out the subtle homoerotic element that underlies several of these stories, notably "The Story of a Panic", "The Point of It", and "The Story of the Siren". show less