Author Description

A traveler steps off the road and finds himself in an alternate reality. A sullen boy accidentally summons a spirit. A man gets more than he bargained for when he buys his fiancee a plot of wooded land. These six stories deal with transformations, the truth of the imagination, and the effect of the unseen on ordinary lives. By juxtaposing the Edwardian English with pagan mythology, E.M. Forster created in this collection a work of lasting strangeness and great beauty. Edward Morgan Forster, OM (January 1, 1879 - June 7, 1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect." Forster was gay, but this fact was not made public during his lifetime. His posthumously released novel Maurice tells of the coming of age of an explicitly gay male character.