A Christmas Memory Hardcover - 1996

First line

Imagine a morning in late November.

From the rear cover

Available for the first time in a single volume are the three holiday stories that Truman Capote regarded as among his greatest works of short fiction. Two of these childhood memoirs - "A Christmas Memory" and "The Thanksgiving Visitor" - center on the author's early years with a family of distant relatives in rural Alabama. Both pay loving tribute to an eccentric old-maid cousin, Miss Sook Faulk, who became his best friend. In "A Christmas Memory", Miss Sook, Buddy (the narrator), and their dog, Queenie, celebrate the yuletide in a hilariously tipsy state. In the poignant reminiscence "One Christmas", six-year-old Buddy journeys to New Orleans for a reunion with his estranged father that shatters many illusions. And in "The Thanksgiving Visitor", Miss Sook invites the school bully, Odd Henderson - called by Buddy "the meanest human creature in my experience" - to Thanksgiving dinner.

From the jacket flap

Taking its place next to Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood on the Modern Library bookshelf is this new and original edition of Capote's most famous short stories: "A Christmas Memory," "One Christmas," and "A Thanksgiving Memory." All three stories are distinguished by Capote's delicate interplay of childhood sensibility and recollective vision.