Make the Christmas season brighter with a wonderful collection of stories, poems, and timeless holiday tales. The Big Book of Christmas brings together a generous selection of classic Christmas stories, festive poems, fairy tales, and seasonal writings by various authors, offering hours of holiday reading for the whole family. From snowy winter nights and cozy firesides to family gatherings, unexpected adventures, acts of kindness, and magical Christmas encounters, these stories capture th...

Discover the wit, warmth, and unforgettable twists of one of America's greatest short-story writers. The Complete Works of O. Henry brings together the celebrated fiction of O. Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter, whose stories are renowned for their clever plots, vivid characters, gentle humor, irony, and surprising endings. Set against the lively streets and neighborhoods of early twentieth-century America, O. Henry's stories often focus on ordinary people facing extraordinary c...

New York talking to itself: a shop girl deciding how to spend her lunch hour, a millionaire's son on a park bench, a waiter who was once a gentleman, and the Fool-Killer walking up a Southern road looking for custom. O. Henry wrote these at the rate of a story a week for the New York World, from hotel rooms and bar tables, and died two years after the book appeared, at forty-seven and in debt. Complete and unabridged.

Sometimes the greatest gifts are the ones given with love and sacrifice. In The Gift of the Magi, O. Henry tells a touching story of a young couple whose love for each other leads them to make deeply personal sacrifices. Della and Jim have very little money, but each wants to give the other a meaningful Christmas gift. Determined to express their love despite their financial struggles, they each make a surprising sacrifice for the person they love most. With warmth, simplicity, and O. Henr...

Everything happened in Alabama. Bill Driscoll and Old Hank thought they needed more money. They decided to kidnap a child. People in small towns love their children very much. In such places you can find lazy fat sheriffs who do not like investigating crimes. They found a boy in one of the courtyards. First thing the child threw a stone in the Bill's eye. With great difficulty, they managed to grab the boy, even though he fought like a bear. The child was taken to a cave, not far from the ...

William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), better known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American short story writer.Porter was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and later moved to Texas in 1882. It was there that he met his wife, Athol Estes, with whom he had two children. In 1902, after the death of his wife, Porter moved to New York, where he soon remarried. It was while he was in New York that Porter's most intensive writing period occurred, with Porter writin...

Della has one prized possession: her hair. Jim has one: his watch. With almost no money for Christmas, each secretly sells the thing they treasure most to buy the perfect gift for the other — and the ending, still one of the most famous twists in short fiction, turns a simple story about being broke into a quiet definition of what love actually costs. O. Henry's most celebrated story and a masterclass in the twist ending — a five-minute read that has been anthologized, adapted, and taught ...

O. HENRY - SELECTED STORIESTable of contentsA Blackjack BargainerAccording to Their LightsA Chaparral Christmas GiftA Cosmopolite in a CafeA Double-Dyed DeceiverAfter Twenty YearsA Lickpenny LoverA Lickpenny LoverA Midsummer Knight's DreamThe Last LeafA Blackjack BargainerThe most disreputable thing in Yancey Goree's law office was Goree himself, sprawled in his creakv old arm- chair. The rickety l...

Santa's Christmas Library gathers more than four hundred seasonal narratives, poems, carols, legends, and illustrated selections into a capacious archive of Christmas writing. Moving from folktale and devotional verse to domestic realism, fantasy, satire, and moral fable, the volume traces the holiday's literary transformations across languages and centuries. Canonical Christmas narratives stand beside fairy tales, hymns, children's literature, and lesser-known period pieces, while such la...

The stories in "Roads of Destiny" are set in various locations and explore a wide range of characters and situations. O. Henry is known for his ability to capture the human condition and the complexities of life through his colorful and often humorous tales. Some of the stories in this collection include "The Guardian of the Accolade," "The Discounters of Money," "The Enchanted Profile," and "The Poet and the Peasant."O. Henry's stories often revolve around ordinary people facing unexpecte...

The Greatest Christmas Stories of All Time is a treasury of short fiction by great writers of the past two centuries — from Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to Willa Cather, Damon Runyon and Beatrix Potter. As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully engaging anthology.

There is something about the number 3.The Ancient Greeks believed 3 was the perfect number, and in China 3 has always been a lucky number, and they know a thing or two.Most religions also have 3 this and 3 that and, of course, in these more modern times, three’s a crowd may be too many, except when it’s a ménage à trois. It seems good things usually come in threes. Whatever history and culture says WE think 3, a hat-trick of stories, is a great number to explore themes and ...