Christmas Stories

Christmas Stories is a treasury of short fiction by great writers of the past two centuriesfrom 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 Bowens "Green Holly" The plight of the less fortunate haunts Chekhovs "Vanka" and Willa Cathers "The Burglars Christmas" but takes a boisterously comic turn in Damon Runyons "Dancing Dans Christmas" and in John Cheevers "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor" From Vladimir Nabokovs intensely moving story of a fathers grief in "Christmas" to Truman Capotes hilarious yet heartbreaking "A Christmas Memory," from Grace Paleys Jewish girl starring in the Christmas pageant in "The Loudest Voice" to the dysfunctional family ski holiday in Richard Fords "CrËche" each of the stories gathered here is imbued with Christmas spirit (of one kind or another), and all are richly and indelibly entertaining.