Showing results for "Celestial" in Short Stories

The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories is a collection of short-stories which Forster wrote during the prewar years, most of which were symbolic fantasies or fables.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

High on a remote mountain, where wind threads through stone and silence gathers in the dome, an old observatory waits for night. Inside, a solitary astronomer begins his ritual. He does not measure or chart. He simply watches — and wonders if the stars might be watching him in return. Through the telescope’s great lens, the familiar sky begins to change. Clusters shift. Constellations breathe. A spiral forms, a rhythm pulses, a triangle glows with deliberate synchrony.

The story from which this collection takes its title describes the adventures of an imaginative boy who discovers an omnibus that enables him to travel to the past in the company of famous historical personages. When at his invitation, an incredulous adult accompanies him on a journey, the astonishing new vistas unfolding alarm the security-conscious older man, who wishes himself back in his comfortable suburban home.

Hawthorne es conocido sobre todo por sus relatos breves, muchas veces de contenido siniestro, al gusto de la época, y por sus cuatros novelas largas. La letra escarlata, La casa de los siete tejados, La novela de Blithedale y El fauno de mármol.