Collectanea: A Collection of Writings

This book is a collection of shorter books and other writings by the same author. Using a literary term, the book may be called a collectanea, or, using a common term, simply a potpouri of writings. The subjects of the writings are varied and mixed. The reader will find mysteries and unsolved homicides in High Stakes, the story about the dark side of professional gambling. The reader can read in The Money Changers about greed, cheating and fraud in the market place, including some of the sophisticated methods now used by predators to cheat others. The author has included in these stories a mix of satire and humor about some current social and political issues. Various sins are necessarily part of the subject matter of these stories. Sex is not a significant ingredient in the story mix, although it might have flavored or spiced up the other ingredients in the recipe. The author has also included in this collection and shares with readers items of a personal nature, including letters written to his children while they were at school away from home and parables written primarily for children.

Allen Shoffner is a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Law, where he was a member of, and authored legal articles for, the Vanderbilt Law Review. He has been active in trial and appellate practice for over fifty years and he has written various articles in legal publications. He served for six years on the Tennessee Law Revision Commission. He had authored and published a historical novel, The Authority, about the misuse and abuse of governmental power by the Tennessee Valley Authority. He wrote In Sickness and In health, A Love Story, which he presented to his wife on their Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary, a true story about tests of faith in struggling with long-term illness. His current novel, High Stakes, is fiction, about the dark side of gambling, Allen Shoffner lives on the family farm in rural Bedford County, Tennessee.