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.
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  ![Angel in Scarlet A Bound and Determined Novel Lavinia Kent Loveswept New
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  _Angel in Scarlet_ is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either
  are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
  resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely
  coincidental.
  
  
  A Loveswept Ebook Original Copyright © 2016 by Lavinia Kent Excerpt from _A
  Very Ruby Christmas_ by Lavinia Kent copyright © 2016 by Lavinia Kent All
  rights reserved.
  
  
  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a
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  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark
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  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book _A Very Ruby
  Christmas_ by Lavinia Kent. This excerpt has been set for this edition only
  and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
  
  
  ebook ISBN 9780399593864
  
  
  