Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh
A Christmas Chrestomathy
Format:Paperback
Publisher:St Augustine's Press
Published:14th Nov '24
£16.00
Supplier delay - available to order, but may take longer than usual.
For over thirty years, Joseph Bottum has been writing widely acclaimed Christmas essays, columns, short stories, and carols for American magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, St. Augustine’s Press has gathered a selection of these classic pieces—with a vast range across the Christmas spectrum.
There’s the comic: “Tinsel. No one needs tinsel. Even the word is a tinselly kind of word.” There’s the sentimental: “Her hair was the same thin shade of gray as the weather-beaten pickets of the fence around her frozen garden.” There’s the reminiscent: “Christmas was books, and books Christmas, in those days now mostly washed down to the cold sea.” Along the way, there’s the theological, the learned, the mystical, and the musical.
“Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art,” he writes in praise of mad and cluttered holidays. “Christmas will not be defined by our failures to apply its lessons and carols,” he explains about Yuletide poetry. To see these essays and short stories gathered in one place—in a beautiful illustrated edition from St. Augustine’s Press—is to see the whole of the vision that Joseph Bottum has been painting for decades: a picture of Christmas as a thin place in the wall between the natural and the numinous, where a burning grace slips into a cold winter world.
Characters who live. Dialogue so real you’ll feel you could talk to these people yourself. Prose that proves both serenely unpretentious and utterly exquisite. And the truth. The truth. Joseph Bottum has produced the most enjoyable Christmas stories you’ll ever read—and the most moving. —Peter Robinson, host of Uncommon Knowledge and former speechwriter to President Reagan
Wit, wisdom, pristine prose, and Christmas. What else can you ask for? This book is bliss. —Andrew Klavan, author of The Truth and Beauty and host of The Andrew Klavan Show podcast
What a Christmas present! Allegorical, humorous stories of hapless, affable gangsters, like the sarcastic tales of Damon Runyon, are counterweighted by moving reflections on Christmas in youth and adulthood, where, despite distractions, the season is still miraculous, tangible, and effective. I loved it. —Ron Hansen, author of Atticus and Mariette in Ecstasy
One of America’s most gifted writers, with a perfect ear and a matchless style. —Andrew Ferguson, author of Land of Lincoln and Crazy U
Joseph Bottum’s name would be mandatory on any objective short list of American public intellectuals. . . . He has the head of Christopher Lasch and the heart of Flannery O’Connor. —Mary Eberstadt, author of How the West Really Lost God and Adam and Eve After the Pill
ISBN: 9781587312441
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 13mm
Weight: 254g
160 pages