title: At The Manger: The Story of Those Who Were There
author: Peter V Orullian
description: The plot device that drives this collection is hardly new; just last Christmas, Max Lucado's One Incredible Moment adopted a similar approach of having the characters at the manger speak about their experiences in the first person. However, rarely has it been done as well as in Orullian's beautifully written anthology of loosely connected short stories. The book opens with the fable of Luke (no, not the Gospel writer), a down-on-his-luck carpenter whose wife convinces him to take a non-paying trial job doing a manger for a local innkeeper, just to demonstrate his skills. The manger becomes, of course, that manger, connecting Luke to the birth of Yeshua. The book succeeds because it imagines the interactions of non-biblical characters, rather than inserting tidy thought bubbles into the story for Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, etc. Here we are asked to conjecture how ordinary people might have responded to Yeshua's birth-and, by extension, how we would respond.<br />Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  The Tragedy of the Life Raft
  
  
  This page copyright © 2003 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  # The Tragedy of the Life Raft
  
  
  ### Jacques Futrelle
  
  
  This page copyright © 2003 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
      
  
  Etext from Futrelle.com
  
  
  Twas a shabby picture altogether—old Peter Ordway in his office;
  
  
  the man shriveled, bent, cadaverous, aquiline of feature, with skin
  
  
  like parchment, and cunning, avaricious eyes; the room gaunt and
  
  
  curtainless, with smoke-grimed windows, dusty, cheerless walls, and
  
  
  threadbare carpet, worn through here and there to the rough flooring
  
  
  beneath. Peter Ordway sat in a swivel chair in front of an ancient
  
  
  roll-top desk. Opposite, at a typewriter upon a table of early vintage,
  
  
  was his secretary—one Walpole, almost a replica in middle age of his
  
  
  employer, seedy and servile, with lips curled sneeringly as a dog's.
  
  
  Familiarly in the financial district, Peter Ordway was “The Usur