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I’ve written dozens of plays and books, always with heart and humor. If you love Christmas, you know that it can also be a frenzied time, so we all need to curl up on a cozy night and read Christmas stories to bring back the magic and generosity of this special holiday. I like well-told tales that reaffirm the love we know is so important, stories that will mean just as much a hundred years from now. And surprise endings are always a delight!
This touching tale, set on a farm, captures the timeless desire we all have to give the perfect gift to those we love. Rob learns the true meaning of love as he gives of himself, and finds a way to surprise his father. Buck has a beautiful way of showing rather than telling, and pulls us in with hope and vulnerability. A gift of love is the best gift of all, and Christmas is the perfect time to share this tender family story.
The true joy of Christmas is to love and to awaken love.
"Christmas Day in the Morning is as gorgeous as the day it celebrates. And unlike so many other presents, the real gift isn't the book itself, it's the simple, pure message. If you give anything this year, give love." --Jason F. Wright, New York Times best-selling author of Christmas Jars
In this adaptation of "Christmas Day in the Morning" Rob looks back on his boyhood and remembers giving an unusual gift of self a gift that filled him with Christmas joy. Now, fifty years later, Rob realizes he…
I’ve always been fascinated by the role that love plays in a satisfying life—from romantic love, to brotherly love, to friendship. Compassion and caring affect not only the recipient, but also profoundly change the life of the giver as well. That’s why I’m drawn to redemptive character arcs. I write women’s fiction, sweet Christmas stories, and literary fiction that revolve around these themes—sometimes with a hint of mystery/thriller/suspense for fun! My novella, The Christmas Club, was adapted for the screen in 2019 as a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie of the same name.
This story shines a spotlight on selfless love. I cried buckets when I read this as a child. I also wondered if I’d ever be willing to cut my hair, as Della did, to raise the money to buy Jim that watch chain. I’m still not sure I would. The story beautifully articulates the parameters of selfless love. I’ve always been fascinated by this theme.
"The Gift of the Magi" is a short story, about a young married couple and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christmas gifts for each other with very little money. As a sentimental story with a moral lesson about gift-giving, it has been a popular one for adaptation, especially for presentation during the Christmas season.
As a writer and performer, I’ve always loved live storytelling! Stories really come alive when performed and there’s an unexplained magic that bonds an audience with the storyteller and connects us to our collective past. Having performed countless times in plays, murder mysteries, and storytelling, the joy and excitement felt crackling in the air is like nothing else. I’ve plenty of fond memories of storytelling over the years, from terrifying ghost stories around the campfire of Camp Wing in America to the fantastical folktales of my stage play The Storyteller’s Apprentice at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. So, next time you’re sitting at a campfire, give it a go!
This Victorian classic sent shivers down my back when the ghost of Jacob Marley rattles his spectral chains to send a dire warning to Ebenezer Scrooge about the perils of his miserly life.
I was gripped from the first word as his tragic life is revealed by the narrator in the most effective and emotive way. I remember feeling anger as Scrooge mistreats his underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, dismisses his kind and generous nephew, Fred, and believes Christmas to be a “Bah!” and a “Humbug!” However, as Scrooge was shown the error of his ways by three phantoms, my anger transformed into sadness and pity.
How could someone be given so many chances at redemption and spurn them all? Happily, Scrooge learned his life lesson before it was too late.
Tom Baker reads Charles Dickens' timeless seasonal story.
Charles Dickens' story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by the three ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, has become one of the timeless classics of English literature. First published in 1843, it introduces us not only to Scrooge himself, but also to the memorable characters of underpaid desk clerk Bob Cratchit and his poor family, the poorest amongst whom is the ailing and crippled Tiny Tim.
In this captivating recording, Tom Baker delivers a tour-de-force performance as he narrates the story. The listener…
I’ve written dozens of plays and books, always with heart and humor. If you love Christmas, you know that it can also be a frenzied time, so we all need to curl up on a cozy night and read Christmas stories to bring back the magic and generosity of this special holiday. I like well-told tales that reaffirm the love we know is so important, stories that will mean just as much a hundred years from now. And surprise endings are always a delight!
Christmas is a wonderful time for magical tales that children love. In this one, a poor but good-hearted cobbler is rewarded for his honesty during the night, when clever elves sneak into his shop and make shoes for him to sell. It gives children the chance to imagine invisible helpers, and also the thrill of doing good deeds in secret.
Here is the classic tale of elfin magic, loved by generations of children and made new by an artist of international acclaim. Jim LaMarche's stunning paintings, reminiscent of his earlier work in The Rainbabies, are the perfect compliment to this favorite Grimm fairy tale.
I'm a “storyseeker” as much as a storyteller. I love hearing people’s ordinary and extraordinary stories; they inspire and motivate me and make me feel hopeful. I think our stories are the most precious things we have, and our greatest legacy. They help us understand each other better and connect us to people we may otherwise never get to meet. That’s why I wrote a book of personal stories called 30 Days: Stories of Gratitude, Traditions, and Wisdom and a 30 Days Journal that helps people record their own stories, by answering a prompt each day for a month. For a nonprofit I help lead called KindWorks, my title is CIO—Chief Inspiration Officer!
Sometimes the answers to our most profound questions can be found in children’s books.
I often find myself turning to this book, based on a story by Leo Tolstoy, when I’m feeling overwhelmed with the enormity of the world’s problems and my sense of inadequacy to do anything to help. The three timeless questions that are posed and answered in this book give me clarity and direction to keep moving forward, the best I can.
Based on a story by Leo Tolstoy. When young Nikolai seeks counsel from Leo, the wise old turtle who lives in the mountains, he is sure Leo will know the answers to his three questions. When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do? But it is Nikolai's own response to a stranger's cry for help that leads him directly to the answers he is looking for. Jon J Muth combined his studies of Zen with his love of Tolstoy to create this profound yet simple book about…
I'm a novelist, born and raised in New York City. To train myself to write realistic fiction, I started working in journalism first. I worked for New York magazine for a decade, writing about crime, politics, and other forms of anti-social behavior. Later, I wrote for television shows like Law & Order and Blue Bloods. But writing novels is what it's all about for me. I have nine of them so far. The audience is obviously quite small compared to the number of people who watch TV shows. But that doesn't matter. Nothing else allows you to communicate so directly from the studio in your mind to the theater in someone's else mind.
My first job in journalism was as an assistant to the great New York newspaperman Pete Hamill. He told me to always read people who were better than you and to back up his point he had a shelf of Russian literature in his bathroom. For years, I was too intimidated to read Tolstoy. When I finally did, I was shocked to discover that much of his writing is as accessible as the New York Post. War and Peace is his most famous work, but for me he’s most alive and urgent in his shorter fiction. The title story is among the most harrowing descriptions of death ever, “Kreutzer Sonata” reveals an understanding of the psychopath’s mind that would have Hitchcock and Kubrick whimpering the covers, and “Haji Murad” is a tale of terrorism and betrayal that could come straight from the current Russian war. Some of Tolstoy’s work…
A vibrant translation of Tolstoy’s most important short fiction by the award-winning translators of War and Peace.
Here are eleven masterful stories from the mature author, some autobiographical, others moral parables, and all told with the evocative power that was Tolstoy’s alone. They include “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” inspired by Tolstoy's own experiences as a soldier in the Chechen War, “Hadji Murat,” the novella Harold Bloom called “the best story in the world,” “The Devil,” a fascinating tale of sexual obsession, and the celebrated “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities…
These books attempt to describe the indescribable, pointing to the unknowable, only the living of which makes living living. What they have in common is that they invite us to practice along with the author, not giving any answers, but inviting us to look. I fell in love with Awareness Practice in my youth and through the decades that love has only deepened. I continue to love this journey of exploration and I hope the books that I have written contribute to that same experience for others. There is nothing more magical than having a direct experience of encountering who we really are, beyond ego’s dualistic world of opposites.
When a clearly enlightened spiritual master speaks to us, our first reaction is often resistance because the message is designed to end the reign of egocentricity and return us to Authentic Being. To me, everything Leo Tolstoy wrote in his maturity offers the same possibility, but none so starkly as My Religion. As with reading Mahatma Gandhi, we have the opportunity to witness the deep practice of an aspirant grappling with transcending the suffering of the human condition, in much the same way John of the Cross describes the “dark night of the soul.” It illustrates every person’s spiritual journey and the uncompromising nature of the path to awakening.
The Journal of Leo Tolstoi is a compilation of Tolstoy's journal entries. They entries range from 1895 through 1899.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (9 September [O.S. 28 August] 1828 - 20 November [O.S. 7 November] 1910), usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. He received multiple nominations for Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906, and nominations for Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902 and 1910, and his miss of the prize is a major Nobel prize controversy.
I lost my marriage. I lost my dad to cancer, and my mom to Alzheimer’s Disease (and wrote a memoir about it). Along the way, I lost my sense of superiority and entitlement. I gained the ability to laugh at myself and trust God for everything. I found that I was not as important as I had tacitly assumed. I’ve learned Jesus’s words are true: “Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” When I see this depicted well in a book, I think, “Thank God for writers who will tell me the truth.” Today, I’m a fiction book coach with a goal of helping writers tell the whole awful, glorious truth.
It’s not possible that Tolstoy died and lived to tell about it, but that's what this book feels like.
As Ivan Ilych’s illness progresses, the reader sees how shallow his relationships are, and how fruitless is his striving to “get ahead.” As I read this book, I felt the vast chasm between the living and the dying, how alone Ivan is in his suffering. Ivan Ilych is no hero: he is an everyman. He squarely faces the pointlessness of his life, and ultimately throws off the things of no importance.
Through his experience I anticipated my own death, and felt how important it must be to live my life remembering that all the stupid stuff doesn’t matter. What does matter is my relationships with God and with other humans. Everyone who expects to die someday should read this book.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s. "Usually classed among the best examples of the novella", The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of the sufferings and death of a high-court judge from a terminal illness in 19th-century Russia.
I have a little secret. I was late to the romance table. Though I grew up with a romance reading mother, my initial interests lay in the fantastical worlds of Paulo Coelho, Anne Rice, and David Gemmel. Romance seemed forbidden, and I didn’t touch the genre until my late twenties, when a nasty breakup sent my disillusioned heart looking for more. And what a revelation! Romance taught me to expect more from myself and my relationships. At the close of one creative career, it lit an unstoppable passion to become a contemporary romance author. And here I am, a decade on, writing romance and sharing my book recommendations with you!
Caveat, I’ve studied Soviet history and my husband is Ukrainian, so when I saw Kissing Tolstoy was heavily drenched in Eastern European commentary—the hero being a Russian Literature Professor—I worried the author would miss a lot of the nuance. But she didn’t!
Now, you don’t need my background to like this book, but I did laugh out loud at some of the aptly put cultural quirks. Kissing Tolstoy is a wonderful mix of inner-city edge, meets intellectual romance.
A real treat if you’re looking for something fun and with depth!
Proceeds for the month of November go to hurricane relief efforts!What do you do when you discover that your super-hot blind date from months ago is now your super-hot Russian Lit professor?You overthink everything and pray for a swift end to your misery, of course!'Kissing Tolstoy' is the first book in the Dear Professor series, is 46k words, and can be read as a standalone. A shorter version of this story (28k words) was entitled 'Nobody Looks Good in Leather Pants' and was available via Penny Reid's newsletter for free over the course of 2017.
I am a writer and educator, originally from the British Isles. Perhaps because of this, I am more than usually aware of the distraction and speed of contemporary American life. As a long-time meditator, and the author of World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down, I am encouraged and inspired by any book that draws attention to our “hurry sickness” and offers practices or suggestions to help us to slow down.
Ursula K.Le Guin is perhaps best known as a novelist and science fiction writer. But her non-fiction is very much worth reading too. I love her values, her courage, her clarity, her persistence. Right to the end of her very long life (she died in 2018 at the age of 88), she was thinking about the art and craft of writing. I find myself deeply inspired and encouraged by Le Guin, and in particular, this book.
Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.
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