Christmas at the New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art

Christmas at The New Yorker brings together The New Yorker's best writers and artists on that magical, spiritual, lamentable theme the holidays. For this collection — the latest in the acclaimed and bestselling series — Henry Finder, The New Yorker's editorial director, has read his way through the magazine's archives, culling the best stories and art from the past seventy-five years. The result is a timeless anthology of fiction, memoir, poetry, cartoons, and cover art that depicts all aspects of Christmas with The New Yorker's inimitable wit and wonder.

Contributors include: Joan Acocella, Charles Addams, Roger Angell, Peter Arno, Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattic, Sally Benson, Roz Chast, John Cheever, James Dickey, Mavis Gallant, Emily Hahn, Elizabeth Hardwick, Helen Hokinson, Garrison Keillor, Ken Kesey, Elizabeth Macklin, William Maxwell, Marianne Moore, Alice Munro, Ogden Nash, H. L. Mencken, John O'Hara, S. J. Perelman, Robert Pinsky, J. F. Powers, William Steig, James Thurber, Calvin Trillin, John Updike, Peter de Vries, and E.B. White.

"[A] timeless gift of fine literature that is destined to last beyond the holiday season." Booklist

This timeless anthology of fiction, memoir, poetry, cartoons, and cover art is the first collection of holiday writings and art from The New Yorker.

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, including such classics as John Cheever’s 1949 story “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor,” about an elevator operator in a Park Avenue apartment building who experiences the fickle power of charity; John Updike’s “The Carol Sing,” in which a group of small-town carolers remember an exceptionally enthusiastic fellow singer (“How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom out when the male voices became King Wenceslas”); and Richard Ford’s acerbic and elegiac 1998 story “Crèche,” in which an unmarried Hollywood lawyer spends an unsettling holiday with her sister’s estranged husband and kids.

Here, too, are S. J. Perelman’s 1936 “Waiting for Santy,” a playlet in the style of Clifford Odets labor drama (the setting: “The sweatshop of Santa Claus, North Pole”), and Vladimir Nabokov’s heartbreaking 1975 story “Christ-mas,” in which a father grieving for his lost son in a world “ghastly with sadness” sees a tiny miracle on Christmas Eve.

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.