Explores how people of faith and goodwill might mark the midwinter season and the Christmas festival with integrity and simplicity.

Simon Hoggart is back with a new treasure-trove of Christmas round robins. And, this time, the bete noire of the Christmas post illustrates the seven deadly sins of the middle classes, including boastfulness (dazzlingly clever children who play the saxophone and ski for Britain); smugness (their job, their house, their holidays are perfect); tiny-mindedness (do we really need to be told how to start a jigsaw by looking for the straight bits?); whimsy (letters written by pets or babies); and the dreaded over-sharing, in which every illness and operation is described in minute detail. Accompanied by Hoggart's wicked commentary, The Hamster that loved Puccini invites us to ponder what compels people to write these letters, and what they tell us about them - and ourselves.

Every Christmas, unwanted round robin letters, stuffed with news of young Chloe's nauseating excellence at - well - everything, the announcement of Janet's cousin's husband's friend's divorce, or the details of Terry's colonoscopy, accumulate on doormats. One day, Simon Hoggart decided to do something about it. He mercilessly presented the most eye-popping examples of such letters in his bestseller, The Cat that Could Open the Fridge, and followed it up with The Hamster that Loved Puccini, hoping he had put a stop to them. And yet the letters, booklets and photo-montages kept on coming. So here, to drive home his message, The Round Robin Letters brings together his two collections in an anthology that will have everyone choking with laughter on their Christmas pudding.

"The world is a surreal pageant," writes Stephen Kuusisto. "Ahead of me the shapes and colors suggest the sails of Tristan's ship or an elephant's ear floating in air, though in reality it is a middle-aged man in a London Fog rain coat which billows behind him in the April wind." So begins Kuusisto's memoir, Planet of the Blind, a journey through the kaleidoscope geography of the partially-sighted, where everyday encounters become revelations, struggles, or simple triumphs. Not fully blind, not fully sighted, the author lives in what he describes as "the customs-house of the blind", a midway point between vision and blindness that makes possible his unique perception of the world. In this singular memoir, Kuusisto charts the years of a childhood spent behind bottle-lens glasses trying to pass as a normal boy, the depression that brought him from obesity to anorexia, the struggle through high school, college, first love, and sex. Ridiculed by his classmates, his parents in denial, here is the story of a man caught in a perilous world with no one to trust--until a devastating accident forces him to accept his own disability and place his confidence in the one relationship that can reconnect him to the world--the relationship with his guide dog, a golden Labrador retriever named Corky. With Corky at his side, Kuusisto is again awakened to his abilities, his voice as a writer and his own particular place in the world around him. Written with all the emotional precision of poetry, Kuusisto's evocative memoir explores the painful irony of a visually sensitive individual--in love with reading, painting, and the everyday images of the natural world--faced with his gradual descent into blindness. Folded into his own experience is the rich folklore the phenomenon of blindness has inspired throughout history and legend.

The advent of the home computer has made Christmas round robin letters ubiquitous. Where once the hot news about Tamsin's A levels would be sent in a short note, now it's not unusual to get a letter that includes several pages of misery--emergency operations, dead relatives, sackings, rainy holidays, and so forth--decorated with jolly snowmen and smiling Santas. Some people go further and send out whole booklets. Computers have also made it possible to include photographs of the family eating paté in their Provencal garden, or sitting in a hot tub in California. Simon Hoggart gets hundreds of round robin letters sent to him every year and has collected the funniest, most irritating, most surreal extracts into this hilarious short book. Along the way he considers why people hate these letters so much and what they tell us about the British middle classes. What, exactly, lies behind the impulse to write about Roger's decision to cycle to work for health reasons, or Jeremy's trip to Tasmania, or the replacement pet rabbit?

In this reflective, light-hearted memoir, author Louis S. Rupnick chronicles his life’s journey, beginning with his childhood on Long Island and ending with the discovery of his life’s purpose, teaching. Long before his teaching career, however, a recently graduated, eighteen-year-old Lou takes off on a cross-country, Jack Kerouac-style road trip, with his trusty canine pal, DOG, and his ’56 Chevy, affectionately named Raunchy. As young Lou puts on more miles, he gathers more memories, wacky stories, and life lessons than he would ever imagine. Now almost sixty years later, Lou takes stock of his most significant experiences, from the humorous to the poignant to the downright extraordinary. About the Author Louis S. Rupnick was born and raised in New Hyde Park on Long Island, New York. Rupnick was an auto mechanic and Child Protective Services investigator and case worker for many years before entering academia. He served on a minesweeper in the USN from 1964 to 1968. He served as Professor of Psychology and Sociology at Suffolk Community College in Riverhead, New York. Now retired, Rupnick resides in Amelia Courthouse, Virginia.