Christmas in a Jugular Vein

Author David Benjamin, who’s always been fascinated by Christmas, has been writing slightly offbeat yuletide tales since he was sixteen.

Christmas in a Jugular Vein 

compiles 38 of Benjamin’s wildly variant and slightly transgressive holiday tales and poems. Among the contents of this sometimes startling, often humorous and occasionally poignant anthology:

• Eight dramas set in Bethlehem on or around 25 December 0000 AD, with all the familiar players and a few surprises.

• An email from the Parkers, who’ve been imprisoned through Christmas in their “smart home” by an electronic system called THING.

• Parodies and take-offs after the style of Dickens (of course), Clement Moore, Lewis Carroll (“Santawocky”) and Robert Service.

• The further adventures of Murray Lefkowitz, the drunk Santa kicked out of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade by Maureen O’Hara in Miracle on 34th Street

• Scrooge’s fourth ghost and the fourth King of the Orient.

• The holiday depredations of George the cat.

• And hey, what’s Christmas without a zombie or two—or lots of ’em?

David Benjamin is a lifelong storyteller. His fiction includes The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked and seven books under his new imprint, Last Kid Books: Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought: Collected Essays, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon and Jailbait.  As a journalist, Benjamin has edited newspapers, published and edited several magazines, and authored SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport. In its first year, Benjamin’s imprint, Last Kid Books, won six independent press awards. His essays have appeared in publications that include the Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Examiner, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, EE Times and Common Dreams. Benjamin and his wife Junko Yoshida have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wisconsin and sometimes in Paris.