Christmas Stories
Diana Secker Tesdell2007

Christmas Stories is a treasury of short fiction by great writers of the past two centuries – from Dickens and Tolstoy to Muriel Spark and John Updike. 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 engaging collection. 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 heart-breaking ‘A Christmas Memory’; from Grace Paley’s Jewish girl starring in a Christmas pageant in ‘The Loudest Voice’ to the dysfunctional family ski holiday in Richard Ford’s ‘Crèche’ – each of the stories gathered here is imbued with Christmas spirit (of one kind or another), and all are richly and indelibly entertaining.

Titre original : Christmas Stories (2007)