eBook Christmas Stories (Everyman's Library) ePub

I love Capote's "A Christmas Memory" so I was willing to pay the price just for that one, but I got a whole set of great stories in the package. This is a handsome hard back, smaller than some of the ostentatious holiday compilations on the market. It is a very nice format. It is a little treasure for me.

This book is something different for the holidays. It has stories by many well-known and respected authors, and is very enjoyable.

Just a little different kind of book for folks who
don't want a large tome but.. a few surprising short stories
about Christmas and the season around it.

Good value.. Well made hardcover book
Makes a nice gift for friends who have everything...

This collection has the best short story authors, such as Tolstoy and Capote. I originally bought it because I wanted one particular story and was pleasantly surprised with the rest of the collection. I am giving it as a gift this year.

A GOOD BOOK TO READ AT CHRISTMAS MAYBE A STORY EACH NIGHT. SPEEDY SERVICE GREAT COMPANY TO DO BUISNESS WITH

Don't bother. I would not have bought this if I had been able to leaf through it first. Long, tedious, pointless stories, obscure for good reason. I put it in the resale box before I was halfway through. Pity.

Every home that celebrates Christmas deserves an anthology of beloved holiday stories that enrich the season. This is not it. Despite the nostalgic cover and the ribbon marker, this rather unpleasant collection lacks most of the familiar and seems to focus on the morbid and depressing. Probably more suited to the jaded and cynical reader, don't buy this one if you are looking for an abridged version of 'A Christmas Carol' to read aloud or 'The Night Before Christmas.' You would do better to buy 'The Kingfisher Book of Christmas Stories' of Michael Hague's Christmas Treasury, or try to buy Tasha Tudor's 'Take Joy' on the secondary market. By all means, save your money and avoid this one. Have a Merry Christmas and, as Tiny Tim observed, 'God Bless us, everyone!'

This book contains 20 short stories by 20 different authors. Most of the authors you are likely to have heard of – Dickens, Gogol, Conan Doyle, Trollope, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Willa Cather, O Henry, Saki, Nabokov, Damon Runyon, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, John Cheever, Truman Capote, John Updike, Muriel Spark, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Richard Ford – but in many cases you may not have read the particular story before. All have some connection with Christmas, but that is usually because the action described took place around Christmastime; the count of Santa Clauses, reindeer, snowmen, Christmas trees and plum puddings is not high.

The Dickens story is not ‘A Christmas Carol’ but ‘The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton’. It is taken from the Pickwick Papers. Written seven years before ‘A Christmas Carol’, it does have some relationship to the Christmas Carol theme – the Sexton taking the part of Scrooge. The Gogol story, ‘The Night Before Christmas’, is taken from ‘Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka’; the Conan Doyle is a Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Blue Carbuncle’.

The Tolstoy, ‘Where Love is, God is’, I was sorry to find uncharacteristically pedestrian. That cannot be entirely the fault of the very old translation (Louise and Aylmer Maude), but neither that nor the Chekhov, 'Vanka' (translated by Constance Garnett), can be said to sparkle, convenient as it may be for the publisher that the translations are out of copyright.

The Gogol, by contrast, translated by the still very much contemporary Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is excellent (and does offer a goodly amount of snow). That is just as well; occupying 54 pages, it is the longest story in the book.

Second longest (50 pages) is Trollope’s ‘Christmas at Thompson Hall’. Oh dear; we wait such a long time for the principal characters to tumble to realizations we as readers reached long ago, I was reminded of Trollope’s reputed habit of writing 3000 words a day, regardless – and that whilst holding down his job as a Surveyor for the Post Office. I guess the way to do that is to steadfastly plod through a simple linear tale, making no attempt at anything posterity is likely to regard as fine writing.

I didn’t list either geese or turkeys among the Christmas features with a low count in this volume. Sherlock Holmes gives us 26 geese, and Alice Munro, in ‘The Turkey Season’, as many turkeys as were killed, plucked and gutted on a turkey farm in a whole season. Munro’s story is for me the most memorable, and probably the finest, in the whole book. (Well, she did win the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.) She places herself, aged 14, working before and after school in the gutting shed of a fictional (not her father’s actual) turkey farm. Her boss, his son, the boss’s sister, a couple of hired women and two hired men are all interesting people in their way, especially to the 14-year-old budding author. Relationships are not easy, there are some blow-ups, and the narrator is savvy enough to realize that there is more going on in the hearts, minds and lives of at least some of her workmates than is openly admitted. Wonderful. (The story is included in Alice Munro’s 1982 short story collection ‘The Moons of Jupiter and Other Stories and is now also available in Selected Stories which has itself been re-published - post-Nobel - as Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014.)