Christmas Stories – Everyman’s Pocket Classics is a compilation of twenty short stories by an eclectic mixture of authors beginning with Charles Dickens and The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton and ending with Richard Ford and Creche. In between are:
Nikolai Gogol (The Night Before Christmas)
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Blue Carbuncle)
Anthony Trollope (Christmas at Thompson Hall)
Leo Tolstoy (Where Love is, God is)
Anton Chekov (Vanka)
Willa Cather (The Burglar’s Christmas)
O. Henry (A Chapparal Christmas Gift)
Saki /H.H. Munro (Reginald’s Christmas Revel)
Vladimir Nabokov (Christmas)
Damon Runyon (Dancing Dan’s Christmas)
Evelyn Waugh (Bella Fleace Gave a Party)
Elizabeth Bowen (Green Holly)
John Cheever (Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor)
Truman Capote (A Christmas Memory)
John Updike ( The Carol Sing)
Muriel Spark (Christmas Fugue)
Grace Paley (The Loudest Voice)
Alice Munro (The Turkey Season)
I like to read some Christmas themed books around this time of the year to help me get into the swing of things but this isn’t the sort of book that’s going to help with that. Most of the stories have very little to do with Christmas at all, even when the word is in the title, and quite a few of them are fairly miserable. In fact I’m beginning to wonder if writing and getting a ‘Christmas’ short story published, presumably in a magazine was a sort of equivalent of the Christmas number one in the pop charts.
There were a few that were enjoyable though, particularly Saki’s Reginald’s Christmas Revel which is very short indeed but is amusing.
I’ve read The Blue Carbuncle but I don’t think I’ve come across any of the other stories. It’s a shame they’re not more Christmassy, but I think your comparison with getting a Christmas number one is probably quite accurate!
Helen,
There were so many magazines in the past that authors could get published in, I can just imagine them all going for the Christmas edition – no matter what the story was! The Blue Carbuncle is the only one that I had read too.
That’s quite an array of authors, and even if it’s not truly Christmassy, I’m still tempted!!
k,
It’s worth reading although curate’s eggish, it just wasn’t what I was looking for at the moment!
This is on my husband’s wish list, and I think he would be OK with the stories not being so Christmassy. The cover is so lovely, that is why I recognized it.
tracybham,
The cover is really lovely as you say, I think I would have bought it just for the cover anyway.