During the Christmas season, mall pet store manager Vernon Ricketts splits his time between selling irresistible puppies and kittens festooned with holiday bows and shielding the mall's loiterers from its over-zealous manager, “Terminator” Vanderlip. Just days before Christmas, Vernon notices a small, bedraggled girl in a worn overcoat desperately trying to blend into the mall's background. Sensing she's a runaway in trouble, Vernon feels obliged to help. His kindness and their chance encounter will produce a Christmas miracle that becomes a legend as it changes lives.

Allan Gurganus’s “A Fool for Christmas” first charmed audiences when he read it on NPR’s “All Things Considered” in 2004. It appears here in print for the first time.

The publication of “A Fool for Christmas” is a partnership between Duke University Libraries (which acquired Gurganus's archives in 2018), Horse & Buggy Press, and Duke University Press.

Allan Gurganus's fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. Books include Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All; White People; Plays Well with Others; The Practical Heart; and Local Souls. Gurganus's essays are seen on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times and in The New York Review of Books. He has been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the American Academy's Sue Kaufman Prize for best first novel, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lambda Literary Award, and the National Magazine Prize. Film adaptations of Gurganus's work have won four Emmys. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gurganus cofounded Writers Against Jesse Helms. His novel in progress is “The Erotic History of a Country Baptist Church.”

-- Sarah Edwards Independent Weekly