Skipping Christmas

Grisham is best known for his legal thrillers and in fact is sometimes credited with creating the genre. However, in addition to Skipping Christmas, he has written a handful of non-legal stories, some non-fiction, and some detective stories: A Painted House (2001), Bleachers (2003), Playing for Pizza (2007), Calico Joe (2012), The Tumor: A Non-Legal Thriller (2016), Camino Island (2017), Camino Winds (2020), the Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer series.

Grisham has twice won the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and has also received the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction. He has written 37 bestsellers. Eight of his novels have been adapted for film. Overall his books have sold 300 million copies, and he is one of only three authors whose books have sold at least 2 million copies on their first printing.

Skipping Christmas marks a dramatic departure for Grisham. In addition to being his only novella-length work and his only work of satire, it takes on a vastly different subject from his legal thrillers: the meaning of Christmas. Its plot and themes are indebted to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but Grisham’s novella provides a modern spin on the story of the redeemed curmudgeon, taking aim at suburban mores, the pressure to conform, and American consumerism.