I received an ARC of this title from Dover Publications through NetGalley.

This brief collection of stories show the true depth of Forster’s literary talent and his ability to infuse fantasy and imagination into his stories. My favorite stories were two in the collection into which Forster incorporates many classical references.

In the Celestial Omnibus, a boy discovers a sign for an omnibus in the lane across from his house. The alley is a very odd place for an omnibus to pass through so the boy gets up very early one morning to investigate it. When the sun rises a carriage does appear out of the fog and the driver picks the boy up. The boy goes on a journey of a lifetime through the clouds and he meets nymphs and great writers and heroes from famous books. The omnibus driver is Sir Thomas Browne, the famous essayist, but the boy doesn’t recognize or understand any of the famous people he meets; he just knows that he has had a wonderful time and has seen amazing things. The story is full of literary allusions and classical references but I won’t give any of them away here so as not to spoil them for other readers.

When the boy comes home after having disappeared all day, his father canes him for telling lies about his supposed journey to heaven. The boys neighbor, Mr. Bons, which happens to cleverly be “snob” spelled backwards, decides he will show the boy that no such omnibus possibly exists. But when the omnibus shows up in the alley and picks up Mr. Bons and the boy, Mr. Bons does not have the same wonderful experience on his journey as the boy; for Mr. Bons’ imagination is not as carefree and vast as the boy and he does not witness the same remarkable landscape as the boy does. It is no wonder in the end that Mr. Bons meets a horrible fate.

My other favorite in the collection is a story entitled “Other Kingdom.” In this story, and upper class aristocrat named Mr. Worters has taken a fiancé from Ireland, Evelyn Beaumont, who is much below his social status. In order to better educate his new fiancé, Mr. Worters hires a classics teacher, Mr. Inskip, to teach her Latin. It is evident from the beginning that Miss Beaumont does not have the intellectual capacity to learn ancient languages, but she does have a whimsical imagination and a carefree spirit.

Mr. Worters decides to buy his fiancé a wood, named Old Kingdom, for a wedding present. When Worters decides that the wood needs fences and paths and bridges, Miss Beaumont gets very upset that he is trying to organize and tame the natural wood. Through several allusions, the reader, or at least this reader, is quickly reminded of Ovid’s story of Daphne and Apollo in the Metamorphoses in which Apollo attempts to capture and tame Daphne the wood nymph. Similar to Apollo, Worters learns the harsh lesson that he cannot tame nature or the spirit of this woman. Miss Beaumont has a metamorphosis of her own but it is not the type that Worters had hoped for.

This is a collection of stories that I will reach for and reread over and over again and every time I read them I will discover something new and different. I highly recommend THE CELESTICAL OMNIBUS AND OTHER TALES from Dover Publications.

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2.5 stars. It’s hard to believe this collection of stories was written by the same man who wrote n  A Room with a Viewn, n  A Passage to Indian, and n  Howards Endn -- all of which I love, and the first of which I consider to be one of my favorite novels of all time. I have heard the stories described as “fantasy” (on the back book cover) or speculative fiction, but really they are just allegories with a mythological bent. They contain none of the darkness or creativity of previous Victorian tales of the supernatural (M.R. James, Blackwood, Machen, Doyle, etc.) nor the thought-provoking speculative predictions -- and pure entertainment -- of Wells or Verne. They are light and corny, with the typical overbearing symbolism of allegory. To quote the final line of “The Curate’s Friend,” which was intended by Forster to be ironic, but quite frankly sums up how I feel about each of these tales: “[T]his is a short story, suitable for reading in the train.”

Short stories, allegorical fable type. Forster, in his trademark beautiful prose, provides several short stories of practical British people who find themselves either able or completely unable to deal with a slight amount of otherworldliness. In the title story, a young boy finds an omnibus that goes to Heaven; however, try though he might to share this vision with the adults around him, he finds himself surrounded by disbelievers. The end result is fair, almost frighteningly so.

Rather reads his books than his short stories.

Bajo el título de «Celestial Omnibus» el autor británico E. M. Foster publicó en 1911 una recopilación de narraciones que había ido escribiendo en los 10 años anteriores. Se trata de cuentos no tan conocidos como sus novelas llevadas al cine, como «Pasaje a la India» o «Howards End».
Los cuentos de «El ómnibus celestial» recogen historias donde la confluencia entre lo real y lo sobrenatural, entre el mundo pagano y el cristianizado, representan la única contribución a lo fantástico en un autor cuya escritura estuvo siempre caracterizada por la sensibilidad, la ironía, el simbolismo, el humanismo y la crítica social. Son todos cuentos muy peculiares, donde la alegoría lo sobrevuela todo, navegando entre la extrañeza y lo convencional.
En los relatos de E. M. Foster se rechazan las normas sociales, están llenos de referencias literarias, de fuerza y esperanza, muy en la línea de C. S. Lewis.
El cuento que da título a la colección «El ómnibus celestial» es considerado hoy como una auténtica joya literaria al señalar de forma alegórica, los peligros de cualquier forma de arrogancia intelectual y pedantería académica frente al simple placer de las artes creativas, de la poesía y la literatura.

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"I see happiness at the bottom of your heart," said he.

"I trust I have my secret springs,"

I find it very difficult to review a short story collection. I don't like to review each story individually, because I don't have enough time, but it seems like I skip too much if I do otherwise. Sometimes I review the collection with a vague conglomeration of what I felt of the stories as a whole, but that really doesn't say much about the stories. In the worst case, I write a review that ends up being potentially off-topic because all it does is talk about how I tend to review short story books without ever taking the time to mention that the stories, perhaps, all have open-ended finales that act like a guitar left alone but still ringing out one note long after the musicians have left the stage as they resound through my head for hours and even days after the last word, or that, in other cases, the title story is possibly my favorite because the veil between the ordinary world and the fantastical world drops most fully, or, at times, that a story entitled "Other Kingdom," perhaps, shows how mistaken people can be in the images that they create of each other. I have decided to risk this review being off-topic, though, as a method of testing the waters again. Will this review remain for a week? A month? A year? A decade? A century? An eon? I'll be watching.

An excellent collection of tales where E.M. Forster tries his hand at far more speculative fiction than some of his more well-known works, a practice I wished he’d done more often because the results were magical. The omnibus was such a delightful, character-specific place where it comes into question whether or not it’s real or imaginary…or is it the character who doubts its existence whose imaginary? More than one story makes its characters wonder if otherworldly forces are at work even amidst the most ordinary settings with ordinary people. Often the ordinary people don’t (or refuse) to notice these forces, acting as the true enemy to the protagonist tentatively reaching out for them. If you like speculative fiction and E.M. Forster, don’t miss this.

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The 3-star review is a little misleading - I really did enjoy most of these little stories, more than your average 3 stars express. I guess it's another 3 1/2.

I'd previously read the eponymous story for a speculative fiction course, and that was fun, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that all of the stories were in the same vein of not quite fantasy, but definitely not just plain fiction. I might even come close to calling it a sort of magical realism. (Well, "The Curate's Friend," I think, is definitely fantasy, but I don't want to split hairs.) It's a lot of fun, in one of those styles that is both very much old-fashionedy and yet familiarly modern.

I didn't get especially invested in any story except for "Other Kingdom," which I loved. Probably one of my favorite short stories now. Still, a good 3 1/2 stars. Good for poolside reading.

Such a fun story! There are two kinds of readers, two approaches to literature.

What I took away from this series of stories, is that being imaginative and creative, and able to look at your life outside the box,is what keeps us going, progressing, and alive. You begin to appreciate what others see, what and how they feel, and how it dictates what they are meant to be. It's such a grand gesture to a person's very existence even if it seems impossible and unreachable.