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A Christmas Story

The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film

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A Christmas Story

Written by: Jean Shepherd
Narrated by: Dick Cavett
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About this listen

The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family's typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.

This audio production of A Christmas Story gathers together in one hilarious volume the gems of autobiographical humor that Jean Shepherd drew upon to create this enduring film. Here is young Ralphie Parker's shocking discovery that his decoder ring is really a device to promote Ovaltine; his mother and father's pitched battle over the fate of a lascivious leg lamp; the unleashed and unnerving savagery of Ralphie's duel in the snow with the odious bullies Scut Farkas and Grover Dill; and, most crucially, Ralphie's unstoppable campaign to get Santa, or anyone else, to give him a Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle. Who cares that the whole adult world is telling him, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid"?

The pieces that comprise A Christmas Story, previously published in the larger collections In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, coalesce in a magical fashion to become an irresistible piece of Americana, quite the equal of the film in its ability to warm the heart and tickle the funny bone.

©2003 The Estate of Jean Shepherd (P)2004 Random House Inc. Random House Audio, a divison of Random House, Inc.
Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Celebration Winter Christmas Funny Heartfelt Witty
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Listen to this every year

Being a fan of the Movie A CHRISTMAS STORY, I had to purchase this Audible Book a few years back. Now I listen to it every year (& watch the movie). This year I listened to it with my husband while we were driving. The narrator is excellent and the background sound effects really add to the story.

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