Christmas Stories: Everyman's Pocket Classics

The perfect stocking stuffer, Christmas Stories: Everyman’s Pocket Classics is an engaging treasury of holiday short fiction by great writers of the past two centuries. Each entertaining story exudes Christmas spirit in all its forms. An early Dickens tale features goblins frolicking in a graveyard. Elizabeth Bowen’s Green Holly features a love-struck ghost who wreaks havoc at a country estate. Though Chekhov’s Vanka and Willa Cather’s The Burglar’s Christmas haunt us with the plight of the less fortunate, comic relief saves the day in Damon Runyon’s Dancing Dan’s Christmas and John Cheever’s Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor. Additional stories include Vladimir Nabokov’s intensely moving Christmas, Truman Capote’s hilarious but heartbreaking A Christmas Memory, Grace Paley’s The Loudest Voice starring a Jewish girl in a Christmas pageant and Richard Ford’s “Crèche” about a dysfunctional family ski holiday.  Hardcover, 395 pages. 7.4" x 4.65".

Museum Provenance

Christmas Stories: Everyman’s Pocket Classics recalls collections in the holdings of our Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Founded in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries is a system of 20 branch libraries and central support services that include a Book Conservation Laboratory and an Imaging Center. Branches are located in Smithsonian museums, research institutes and offices in Washington, DC, New York City, Edgewater and Suitland, MD, and the Republic of Panama. The Libraries hold a total of 1,571,114 volumes, 5,534 journal subscriptions, 2,667 electronic journals/databases and 40,000 rare books. The website registers over 3 million visitor sessions annually.

Every Smithsonian purchase will arrive with a museum provenance card explaining how it is adapted from or inspired by an object or objects in our collection.