Selected Stories

Twelve stories published during E.M. Forster’s lifetime, including "The Machine Stops", a dystopian parable about technology and isolation over a century before the advent of social media

Best known for his novels, Howards End, A Room with a View, and Passage to India, E.M. Forster was also the author of many remarkable short stories that he referred to as "fantasies". This collection of twelve stories published in his lifetime — featuring "The Machine Stops", a prophetic glimpse into our contemporary world of social media and the growing influence of AI, decades before other dystopian classics like 1984, Brave New World, and We — displays Forster’s fascination with myth, magic, and the connections that make us human. Rich in irony and alive with sharp observations on the surprises life holds, the stories often feature violent events, discomforting coincidences, and other disruptive happenings that throw the characters' perceptions and beliefs off balance. In their keen introduction, David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell discuss Forster's place in both the short-story tradition and the canon of gay literature.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Introduction by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text

SELECTED STORIES

The Story of a Panic
The Other Side of the Hedge
The Celestial Omnibus
Other Kingdom
The Curate's Friend
The Road from Colonus
The Machine Stops
The Point of It
Mr Andrews
Co-ordination
The Story of the Siren
The Eternal Moment

Explanatory Notes

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879, attended Tonbridge School as a day boy, and went on to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1897. With King’s he had a lifelong connection and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 1946. He declared that his life as a whole had not been dramatic, and he was unfailingly modest about his achievements. Interviewed by the BBC on his eightieth birthday, he said: ‘I have not written as much as I’d like to . . . I write for two reasons: partly to make money and partly to win the respect of people whom I respect . . . I had better add that I am quite sure I am not a great novelist.’ Eminent critics and the general public have judged otherwise and in his obituary The Times called him ‘one of the most esteemed English novelists of his time’.

He wrote six novels, four of which appeared before the First World War, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard’s End (1910). An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India. It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Maurice, his novel on a homosexual theme, finished in 1914, was published posthumously in 1971. He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work, Aspects of the Novel; The Hill of Devi, a fascinating record of two visits Forster made to the Indian State of Dewas Senior; two biographies; two books about Alexandria (where he worked for the Red Cross in the First World War); and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Britten’s opera Billy Budd. He died in June 1970.