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Different Christmas

Even among high-functioning alcoholics, Augusten Burroughs is an acquired taste.

But for those who like their holiday spirit with gallons of vodka and a heaping portion of irreverence, "You Better Not Cry" (St. Martin's Press, $22) is at times a laugh-out-loud read.

The seven short stories in the collection all share a Christmas theme. Some take readers to familiar terrain - Burroughs' childhood, so vividly captured in his debut memoir "Running with Scissors" - while others give us a glimpse of his adult life as a best-selling, middle-aged writer living with his male partner in western Massachusetts.

Viewing the Bard

There's no play attributed to Shakespeare about a Puritan woman who whipped her cat for catching mice on Sunday. That doesn't prevent Bill Bryson's biography of the poet - "Shakespeare: The Illustrated and Updated Edition" (HarperCollins, $29.99) - from including a picture of the legendary scene. It recalls Shakespeare's dislike of Puritans, such as the comic Malvolio in "Twelfth Night."

The scores of pictures range from little sketches such as the woman and her cat, tucked into the corner of a page, to a brightly colored four-page panorama of London in the 1600s. This one image stretches across the inside of both the front and back covers. Text as well as pictures make it a great Christmas gift to any earnest high-schooler trying for Advanced Placement in English.

Prize-winner

Linden MacIntyre, an investigative journalist who wrote a novel about sexual abuse by Catholic priests, has won one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards. MacIntyre won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his book "The Bishop's Man."

The novel tells the story of a Roman Catholic priest tasked with stamping out sex abuse scandals before they go public. The book is set in Antigonish, Nova Scotia - a place MacIntyre calls one of Canada's most religious communities.

The book is especially timely, coming out shortly before Canada was rocked by a high-profile scandal that saw a bishop arrested for possessing child pornography.

The $47,000 prize, created in 1994, honors Canadian fiction. Past winners have included Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler and Alice Munro.

The judges this year included Canadian novelist Alistair MacLeod, U.S. novelist Russell Banks and British biographer Victoria Glendinning.

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