Synopsis
From the pages of America’s most influential magazine come eight decades of holiday cheer–plus the occasional comical coal in the stocking–in one incomparable collection. Sublime and ridiculous, sentimental and searing, Christmas at The New Yorker is a gift of great writing and drawing by literary legends and laugh-out-loud cartoonists.
Here are seasonal stories, poems, memoirs. and more, from a stellar roster of writers, including John Cheever, James Dickey, Richard Ford, Ken Kesey, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabokov, S. J. Perelman, Adrienne Rich, and James Thurber. And it wouldn’t be Christmas–or The New Yorker–without dozens of covers and cartoons by Addams, Arno, Chast, and others, or the mischievous verse of Roger Angell, Calvin Trillin, and Ogden Nash (“Do you know Mrs. Millard Fillmore Revere? / On her calendar, Christmas comes three hundred and sixty-five times a year.”)
From Jazz Age to New Age, E. B. White to Garrison Keillor, these works represent eighty years of wonderful keepsakes for Christmas, from The New Yorker to you.
About John Updike
Photo © Martha Updike
John Updike was the author of more than sixty books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have been honored with the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Hugging the Shore, an earlier collection of essays and reviews, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He died in January 2009.
Praise
“[A] whimsically delicious collection . . . as uplifting as it is cynical. Even Scrooge would find it worth the moola.”
–Entertainment Weekly
“No publication in history has ever delivered on [Christmas] delights better than has The New Yorker. And here in an astonishing richness of wit and dignity, acid and humane letters, is a complication of the best stuff.”
–Baltimore Sun
“This collection truly shines. . . . A treasure trove of quality work from the 1920s into the twenty-first century with themes that accentuate the holiday’s timeless appeal.”
–The Florida Times-Union
“An anthology of many charms.”
–The New York Times