Knopf Doubleday, Belletristik, Christmas Stories (Englisch, Diana Secker Tesdell, 2008)

Now joining Everyman&rsquo s Library&mdash the most extensive and distinguished collectible library of the world&rsquo s greatest works&mdash 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. 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&rsquo s &ldquo Green Holly.&rdquo The plight of the less fortunate haunts Chekhov&rsquo s &ldquo Vanka&rdquo and Willa Cather&rsquo s &ldquo The Burglar&rsquo s Christmas&rdquo but takes a boisterously comic turn in Damon Runyon&rsquo s &ldquo Dancing Dan&rsquo s Christmas&rdquo and in John Cheever&rsquo s &ldquo Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor.&rdquo From Vladimir Nabokov&rsquo s intensely moving story of a father&rsquo s grief in &ldquo Christmas&rdquo to Truman Capote&rsquo s hilarious yet heartbreaking &ldquo A Christmas Memory,&rdquo from Grace Paley&rsquo s Jewish girl starring in the Christmas pageant in &ldquo The Loudest Voice&rdquo to the dysfunctional family ski holiday in Richard Ford&rsquo s &ldquo Crè che&rdquo &mdash each of the stories gathered here is imbued with Christmas spirit (of one kind or another), and all are richly and indelibly entertaining.