On the ninth day of Christmas, Overlook Press gave to me …

With only four installments in the ongoing 12 Days of Overlook Christmas giveaway remaining, you may be asking yourselves what tricks we could possibly still have up our sleeves for these final days of literary gift-giving. With eight days of previous giveaways under our belts, we have already handed out a portable Portis paperback collection, a trio of illustrated designer tomes, a set of hair-raising historical mysteries, three scoops for journalism junkies, classic and contemporary kid-lit, visual volumes for the holidays, a menagerie of Mervyn Peake stories, and a Dickens-inspired Christmas compendium, but we have saved one of our perennial favorite stocking-stuffers for today’s lucky winner. Congratulations to Elisabeth Hilverda, who took home yesterday’s tinsel-themed prize pack, and make sure to continue sending us Facebook comments and tweets if you want to cash in on today’s special gift!

Although this holiday giveaway has been focused on the 12 Days of Overlook Christmas, December brings a bevy of holiday celebrations that we would be remiss to ignore. Tonight at sundown begins Hanukkah, AKA the festival of lights. During the eight days of Hanukkah, menorahs the world over will be lit to commemorate the ancient miracle in which one day’s supply of oil burned for eight nights. Dreidels will be spun, latkes will be consumed, and Adam Sandler songs and movies will be looped on repeat. To celebrate the first night of Hanukkah (as well as the ninth day of our Overlook Christmas), today we are giving away two of the most recent additions to our Collector’s Wodehouse series, as well as two forthcoming sneak peeks to be released in 2012: Mike at Wrykyn, The Adventures of Sally, The Gold Bat, and Love Among the Chickens.

The late Christopher Hitchens called P.G. Wodehouse “the gold standard of English wit,” and shared a deep love and passion for PGW with writers including Stephen Fry and Evelyn Waugh. At Overlook, we publish more than eighty books in our Collector’s Wodehouse series (at one book per day, that’s more than eight Hanukkah’s worth) and share in their deep respect and admiration for Wodehouse’s brand of bubbling British humor.

In Mike at Wrykyn (coming April 2012), Wodehouse evokes the peaceful, prosperous world of middle-class England before the Great War, a place where rich men hire private cricket professionals to coach their sons at home, and little seems to matter at school except the publishing of team lists and the taking of tea. The Adventures of Sally (2012) is a transatlantic comedy set in worlds Wodehouse knew well: American theaters, English country houses, and the theatrical boardinghouses where young men and women dream of finding fame and fortune. These two advance releases make the perfect gift for the Wodehouse novice, or for those who only know him through Blandings and Picadilly.

Love Among the Chickens is the tale of Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, one of Wodehouse’s favorite protagonists, and his fraught attempt to establish a business farming chickens on the coast of Dorset. Set in English public school in the years before World War I, The Gold Bat tells the story of O’Hara and Moriarty, two boys at Wrykyn School, who tar and feather the statue of a pompous local politician, and mislay at the scene of their crime a tiny god bat. A gentle early comedy, which should delight Wodehouse diehards and new readers alike.

As always, there are three ways to enter:

1. Comment on this post

2. Tweet at us using the hashtag #OverlookChristmas

3. Leave a comment on our Facebook page

You can enter once in each area until 8 AM tomorrow morning, and we will be announcing a winner in Monday’s post. After all entries are received, we choose a winner using random.org. Please leave an email address when entering so we can contact you if you’ve won.