Mark Hager wrote short stories between 1940 and 1960 about his early life in rural Southwest Virginia in the first part of the 20th Century. These stories were published in a number of popular magazines. This anthology of his short stories also contains his biography and a description of his writing.

For those who loved Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers and E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed. Drawing on toughness and skills forged in hardscrabble Depression-era North Carolina, Bronze Star recipient and expert B.A.R. rifleman Harold Frank invades Normandy, fights Germans, and endures a grueling stint in a German POW camp where he witnesses the fire-bombing of Dresden. From D-Day to Dresden with a Crack Shot B.A.R. Rifleman D-Day 1944: twenty-year-old PFC Harold Frank had moved as one with his battalion onto the shores of Utah Beach, pushing into France to cut off and blockade the pivotal Nazi-occupied deep-water port of Cherbourg. As a recognized crack shot with WW II's iconic American automatic rifle, Frank fought bravely across the bloody hedgerows of the Cotentin Peninsula. During the most intense fighting, Frank was ambushed and wounded in a deadly, nine-hour firefight with Germans. Taken prisoner and with a bullet lodged under one arm, Frank found himself dumped first in a brutal Nazi POW concentration camp, then shipped to a grueling work camp on the outskirts of Dresden, Germany, where the young PFC was exposed to the vengeance of a crumbling Nazi regime, the menace of a rapidly advancing Russian military—and the danger of thousands of Allied bombers screaming overhead during the firebombing of Dresden. Historian Mark Hager builds on hundreds of hours of interviews with Harold Frank, sharing the intimate and heart-pounding account of Frank’s journey as a child of the Great Depression to the bloody shores of the D-Day invasion, into the bowels of Nazi Germany, and back to the U.S. where as a young man Harold would spend years resolutely dealing with the lingering effects of starvation rations while determinedly building a new life—a life always mindful of the legacy of his POW experience and his faithful service in America’s hard-fought war against Nazi aggression.

A lush, gripping, psychologically complex novel that asks: How much do siblings owe one another? At the edge of a woods, on the grounds of a defunct “free school,” Ava and her brother, Fred, share a dreamy and seemingly idyllic childhood—a world defined largely by their imaginations, a celebration of curiosity and the natural environment, and each other’s presence. Their parents, progressive educators, believe passionately that children develop best without formal instruction or societal constraint. Everyone is aware of Fred’s oddness—the word “autism” is whispered—but his parents’ fierce disapproval of labels keeps him free of clinical evaluation, diagnosis, or intervention, and constantly at Ava’s side. Decades later, Fred is arrested for a shocking crime, and Ava is frantic to piece together the story of what actually happened. A boy is dead. Fred is held in a county jail. But could he really have done what he’s accused of? By now their parents are long gone, and the siblings have fallen out of touch, which causes Ava considerable guilt. Who is left to reach Fred? To explain him and his innocence to the world? Convinced that she alone can ensure he is regarded with sympathy, Ava tells their enthralling story. A writer of enormous craft, Leah Hager Cohen brings her trademark intelligence and storytelling to a psychologically gripping, richly ambiguous novel that suggests we may ultimately understand one another best not with facts alone, but through our imaginations.

Bill and Judy Stephens are graduates of Moody Bible Institute. He is the author of How to Get to Heaven and Back. They have both been teachers of the Holy Scriptures and are dedicated to doing what’s right. You will not be wasting your time if you read this book. He tells you what the disciples are thinking as Jesus, the greatest storyteller of all time, tells stories that will tell you how to get to heaven.

Borrowing from the ancient rabbinic use of midrash as a means of opening Scripture to students, James Lowry has chosen six texts from among those in which he believes Mark deliberately left silences. The author is convinced Mark hoped his readers would be encouraged to raise a variety of possibilities as to what the evangelist left unsaid. Beginning with Mark choosing not to name the temptations of Jesus (Mark 1:12-13) and concluding with Mark choosing to conclude his narrative with the women leaving the tomb of Jesus in stunned silence (Mark 16:8), Lowry spins short stories that suggest several alternative ideas as to how the biblical narrative might have played. In half of the tales, Lowry enters the text and adds fictitious material to Mark's narrative. In the other half, his stories are set in the small textile town of Great Falls, South Carolina, where the author grew up in the 1950s. The hope is these stories will encourage readers of Mark and groups of his readers to raise other possibilities.