The gift of the Magi
by O. Henry · first published 1906
7mentions
3recommended by
7HN commenters
2014–2023first – last mentioned
43% recommend57% neutral
Wonderful Christmas story, you laugh and cry at the same time, tender, inspiring, and the best of it is, you know it's all a storm in a teacup. What they have is priceless.
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…IMHO: 1. A Christmas Carol - C. Dickens (timeless Skroutz!) 2. The Little Match Girl - H. C. Anderson 3. The Elves and the Shoemaker - Brothers Grimm 4. A Letter From Santa Claus - M. Twain 5. The Gift of the Magi - O. Henry 6. Papa Panov’s Special Christmas - L. Tolstoy 7. The Nutcracker and The Mouse King - E.T.A Hoffman 8. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle - Sir A. Conan-Doyle 9. The Snowman - Raymond…
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite Christmas fable?” ↗much of O. Henry, "The gift of the Magi", and "The Last Leaf" are really good. Also virtually anything by Borges, "The Library of Babel" is a nice place to start.
on “Ask HN: What's a favorite short story of yours?” ↗Your #1 is the same as mine. I don't know any of the others except for The Gift of the Magi, that's a good one also. I'm a huge fan of The Year Without A Santa Claus and this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbfgVEk-mxQ I know that's not what you meant but I love, love, love it.
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite Christmas fable?” ↗…Fortune gives and fortune takes away. Some of the most popular and retold stories in Western literature are not good vs bad. There are no "good guys and bad guys" in Romeo of Juliet, To Build a Fire, The Gift of the Magi, etc There are, of course, challenges. But those challenges are not evil or bad. They are just the human (or natural) condition. Childlike minds might demand a good guy vs bad guy narrative, but it's…
on “The Universal Structure of Storytelling” ↗…in this database and write the output as a mysql query. ------------------------End Prompt-------- Take some text and place it above this prompt (I use text-davinci-003 with temp 0) Example from The Gift of the Magi INSERT INTO Personalities (char_name, values, interests, strengths, descr) VALUES ('Della', 'generosity, love', 'buying gifts for Jim', 'resourcefulness, determination', 'The protagonist of the story');…
on “Show HN: Prompt Engineering to extract data from a story and into a database” ↗I thought he was more well-known! His most famous short story was probably "The Gift of the Magi" but I quoted "The Green Door". http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/ohenry/the4m15.htm
on “RIP Martin Schaedel: 1985–2009” ↗It’s like a Gift of the Magi for the modern era.
on “She was missing a chunk of her brain – it didn’t matter” ↗