A Christmas memory, One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving visitor - Truman Capote

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.

These three heartwarming classics are all distinguished by Capote's delicate interplay of childhood sensibility and recollective vision.