title: A Literary Christmas: Great Contemporary Christmas Stories
author: Lilly Golden
description: In this treasury of seasonal tales, the common theme is often just a peg on which a heavy cloak is hung. To be sure, there is an occasional snowfall, a slow dawning of warm feeling for humanity (or at least family), a Christmas ham and even a starving urchin. But it is their distinctively modern mien that truly unites these 27 stories and makes this volume a worthy addition to the shelf the Christmas works of Dickens and O. Henry have anchored for so long. For every story with what Golden calls an "emphasis on communion in a secular sense," such as Leo Rosten's "The Night of the Magi" and Ron Carlson's "The H Street Sledding Record," a sweet paean to love and family life, there is one about loneliness and disaffection, such as Patricia Highsmith's "A Clock Ticks at Christmas" and Hortense Calisher's "A Christmas Carillon." With stories by Italo Calvino and Ivan Klima, which offer social commentary in fable form, one can experience a postmodern Christmas; then again, stories by Grace Paley, Sean O'Faolain, Ntozake Shange and Toni Cade Bambara depict multicultural Christmases. Noel as seen here may not always be joyous, but it is certainly sophisticated. <br />Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: **When She Was Naughty**
  
   **A Christmas Short Story**
  
   **By Tessa Dare**
  
   **Table of Contents**
  
  Title Page
  
  About the Book
  
  Chapter One
  
  Chapter Two
  
  Chapter Three
  
  Chapter Four
  
  A Note from the Author
  
  More Books by Tessa Dare
  
  An excerpt from The Wallflower Wager | (Girl Meets Duke) | They call him the
  Duke of Ruin...
  
  About the Author
  
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  > > > **About the Book**
  
  A Christmas Eve ball.
  
  A light-hearted beauty.
  
  An earl who needs to come in from the cold.
  
  All year long, Chloe Garland’s been trading witty remarks and heated glances
  with her nemesis, the arrogant Lord Cheverell. But when Chloe tricks him into
  wearing a hideous waistcoat—complete with sequins, pompoms, and jingle
  bells—to her family’s Christmas Eve party, she may have gone too far. Her
  penalty? A single, scorching kiss—and a Christmas gift she never expected.
  
  Love.
  
  A warm, funny, Regency short story to celebrate a few cherished traditions:
  ugly Christmas sweaters, 