MIDWINTER: A Collection of Holiday Stories

Twelve stories. Twelve holidays. One long night that connects them all.Midwinter gathers twelve stories set during the darkest turn of the year, from Hanukkah in a quiet Brooklyn apartment to New Year's Eve on a Norwegian dispatch line, from a Diwali homecoming in Texas to a lantern festival in a flooded, half-future Shanghai. Some are quietly realistic. Some let a little magic in through the door. All of them are about the same thing: the moment when something passes between the living and the dead, between what was and what comes next.A woman finds an ornament her late wife made for a Christmas she didn't live to see. A dispatcher spends her overnight shift deciding what belongs in the log and what doesn't. A man crosses a mountain pass and meets the same figure his father met, thirty years and one lifetime apart. A small Austrian village discovers that Krampus has run for local office, and won. A daughter drives twelve hours with a box of sweets and no idea what she'll say when she gets there.Midwinter moves between kitchens, control rooms, snowbound mountain roads, and one very crowded department store on Christmas Eve, all while holding onto the thread that ties them together: that winter, in every culture that has ever named it, has always been a threshold season, and thresholds are where the interesting things happen.For readers of quiet, character-driven short fiction with a touch of the uncanny, in the tradition of collections that turn a single season into a way of seeing the whole year.Twelve nights. Twelve traditions. One very long winter.