Short Family

Deserted by her husband, Audrey was forced to raise her sons, Erick and Robert, alone. When Erick continued a downward path with the wrong crowd, despite Audrey's intervention, his luck ran out after he repeatedly disobeyed the law and was sent to jail. Preoccupied with how she could have saved Erick from a life of crime, Audrey stuck by her son, visiting him every week and prayed that he would see the light and clean up his life.

Friends First is a testament to the power of faith and to the resilience of the human spirit. As a teenager, Fiona is rescued from an alcoholic, abusive father by her boyfriend, Cliff. His family, who take Fiona in, convince her that she is in no way to blame for her father's drinking and his physical and verbal abuse. Feeling unsure and lacking confidence, Fiona clings to Cliff whom she sees as her savior until they eventually marry. Her marriage to Cliff would seem liked a "happily ever after" ending. But, once again, life events intervene.

It sounds innocent enough. A young boy's mother decides she wants carpet in her kitchen. But sometimes those simple little decisions change lives in ways you might never imagine, and when those changes come for a young boy and his family, they leave a lasting impact that threatens to not only destroy their house, but their home as well. This short story by Thomas L. Scott takes the listener along a path that is at once heartbreaking, hopeful, honest and inspirational. You'll want to listen to it again and again.

Peter Herring was the center of Anne's universe in college, and now, a few years later, he's become the center of Anna's, and merely a minor player in his ex-girlfriend's world. That is, until Peter and Anna are invited into Anne's parents' home to visit with her dying mother, and he finds himself drawn back into her orbit. Years later, when her own mother is dying, Anna will find herself yearning to reach out to Anne, with whom she had shared such a brief but intimate bond, and find solace in that moment from long ago.

Ed and Kim experience unexpected consequences when they try to reunite their adopted daughter with her Native American heritage. The couple decides to take turns splitting their time between their Seattle condo and the second home they've built on the Montana prairie so Kaitlyn can get to know her birthplace.

Stan Leidel has vanished from Beatty…again...leaving his two sons, Tim and Mark, to once again fend for themselves. But this time, there just has to be a good ending to the story! That Hoosiers Cap...a short story of 11000 words.

In three different loosely-related vignettes, Bradley Lewis uses a fictional narrative to present a glaring view of lives gone sour. Dissolution takes you to the darkest place in the lives of three different couples; two are married, and one young couple struggling with the idea of permanency. This tour de force will grab you from the first page and lead you down a path of circumstances that have gone horribly wrong. These addicting stories will send chills down the spine of anyone who has ever been married or in a relationship.

Wild mustangs, ghosts on the ranch, gun-toting outlaws and trailblazing cowboys roam the pages of this collection of 8 classic stories about the American frontier. Travel down "The Road to Hell" with a mysterious ranch builder, face down the "Yellow Devil" mountain lion, travel "Where the Wind Blows Free," and join in on a herd of other adventures that will keep you reading until long after high noon.

Quiet As They Come is a beautiful and at times brutal portrait of a people caught between two cultures. Set in San Francisco from the 1980s to the present day, this debut collection explores the lives of several families of Vietnamese immigrants as they struggle to adjust to life in their new country, often haunted by the memories and customs of their old lives in Vietnam. While some are able to survive and assimilate, others are crushed by the promise of the "American Dream."

With My Face to the Enemy is one of the most provocative and wide-ranging anthologies on the Civil War to come along in years. Its illuminating essays examine the war from perspectives that were critical to its outcome - the larger-than-life personalities of its important players and the national strategies and key battle tactics that shaped the four-year-long crisis.

Willa Cather is considered to be one of the best chroniclers of pioneer life in the 20th century. She had a long and distinguished career writing essays, poems, short stories, and novels. This story is a powerful example of a frequent theme: the haunting, sometimes painful, contrast between city and country life.

Evie loves running her beach café in Cornwall, but with a baby on the way she's been told to put her feet up. Helen's come to Cornwall to escape the stress of city living. She hopes a seaside life will be the answer to all her dreams. When she sees a job advertised at the café, it sounds perfect. But the two women clash, and sparks fly. Can the pair of them put aside their differences in a crisis?

A Guide to Being Born is organized around the stages of life - love, conception, gestation, birth - and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel's stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way.

Here is one of London's famous stories of the Klondike, where men had to battle the elements, and often each other, to survive.

With rich, pure prose Hoffman charts the progress of Gretel Samuelson from the time she is a young girl already acquainted with betrayal and grief, until she finally leaves home. Gretel's sly, funny, knowing perspective is at the heart of this collection, as she navigates through loyalty and loss with the help of an unforgettable trio of women: her best friend, Jill, her romance-addled cousin Margot, and her mother, Franny, whose spiritual journey affects them all.

If Nick has learned anything since that day, it's that you don't always get what you want out of life. He certainly doesn't want to get beat up every day because of the choices his parents have made, but trying to explain the unfairness of it all to the black-haired bully following him around wouldn't be very helpful. Something has to change, and if the adults around him aren't willing to take steps to bring about that change, perhaps Nick just might.

Living under the shadow of two gifted parents, Astrid Nordling feels trapped everywhere but at the piano, finding solace in Schubert and Debussy. Her piano teacher is convinced that she is a prodigy; her mother is not so sure. Set in 1960s Chicago, this excerpt from Lisa Heiserman Perkins' upcoming novel shows that there can be such a thing as too much talent in a single family. As Astrid competes with her dramatic, high-strung mother for the spotlight, their tug-of-war threatens to pull the family apart.

When a stray dog walks into a sleepy Chiltern village, she touches the lives of many people there, but can she help the recently widowed Alfie Ellis, who has been living a kind of half life since the loss of his wife of 43 years?

Stories and "True Facts" about growing up Southern in the good old days. More than a dozen southern authors contribute warm, nostalgic stories and fun trivia about "the era before shopping malls, Disney, and Wal-Mart." Includes the authors' favorite nostalgic recipes.

A Christmas Carol is undoubtedly the most famous supernatural story in English. However, it was not the only supernatural story of the season that Charles Dickens wrote. In Victorian England, Christmas was the time to explore the supernatural in stories, and Charles Dickens was one of the best at it. Included in this volume are a full-cast dramatization of A Christmas Carol, plus three more of Dickens' best stories of the season.