Now joining Everyman's Library--the most extensive and distinguished
collectible library of the world's greatest works--is an appealing new
collection in a small Pocket Classics format, perfect for gift giving
and reading pleasure.
Christmas Stories is a treasury of short fiction by great writers of
the past two centuries--from Dickens and Tolstoy to John Updike and
Alice Munro. As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything
from intimate domestic dramas to fanciful flights of the imagination,
and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully
engaging anthology.
Goblins frolic in the graveyard of an early Dickens tale and a
love-struck ghost disrupts a country estate in Elizabeth Bowen's "Green
Holly." The plight of the less fortunate haunts Chekhov's "Vanka" and
Willa Cather's "The Burglar's Christmas" but takes a boisterously comic
turn in Damon Runyon's "Dancing Dan's Christmas" and in John Cheever's
"Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor." From Vladimir Nabokov's
intensely moving story of a father's grief in "Christmas" to Truman
Capote's hilarious yet heartbreaking "A Christmas Memory," from Grace
Paley's Jewish girl starring in the Christmas pageant in "The Loudest
Voice" to the dysfunctional family ski holiday in Richard Ford's
"Crèche"--each of the stories gathered here is imbued with Christmas
spirit (of one kind or another), and all are richly and indelibly
entertaining.
