Christmas stories - Diana Secker Tesdell

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 "Crche"-each of the stories gathered here is
imbued with Christmas spirit (of one kind or another), and all are richly and indelibly
entertaining.