A Celestial Omnibus: Short Fiction on Faith

by J.P. Maney (Editor), Tom Hazuka (Contributor)

A father finds an unlikely sign of rebirth while mourning his son's sudden death. A Latino community's hopes and dreams are revealed in letters to the saints. A Buddhist zoo animal keeper finds his life altered by his city's political machine. A Christian woman living with cancer and her imprisoned Muslim son search for their own ways to go on.These stories and the twenty others included in this book offer rich rewards to all who have struggled with questions of meaning in their own lives. Including fiction from both widely celebrated and up-and-coming writers, this volume illuminates questions of life and death, doubt and faith, God and evil from a variety of ethnic (EuroAmerican, African-American, Asian-American, Native American) and faith (Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Native American) perspectives. The result is a sometimes disturbing, often reassuring, always powerful book.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Religion, Spirituality

338 pages, Hardcover

First published October 3, 1997

Reviews

[Jeff]

For the most part, not my cup of tea. Most of the stories didn't do it for me. However, there were a few that grabbed me; I'm sure I'll read them again: Pigeon Feathers (John Updike), Sweat (Zora Neale Hurston), The Celestial Omnibus (E. M. Forster), The Silver Crown (Bernard Malamud), and Gimpel the Fool (Isaach Bashevis Singer). I'm sure I'll get strenuous objections from fans of Nabakov, Philip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor, etc., but hey, to each his own. Funny thing about stories--you can feel nothing toward them one time, & down the road they really meld with your spirit. I know that as I grow as a connoisseur of short fiction I'll find gems in stories I hadn't seen before. I look forward to the journey!

[Yoby]

Not just from a Christian point of view. About the realities of living out a faith or having it driven to the point of despair, or recovering it after a severe challenge, or just the oddness and strangeness of the nature of faith, our own or someone elses. A good dipper.

[Rachel]

I enjoyed most of the stories, but now can't remember details.

[Emily Kazmierski]

Some of the stories in here are great (Forster's The Celestial Omnibus and Roth's The Conversion of the Jews were easily my favorites. But many of the stories failed to grab me.

[Ladan]

Recommendation from Rev. Jim Nelson