Junior Asparagus and Laura Carrot learn that patience is a virtue—especially if you’re in a hurry!

Collects What If? #33-38. Iron Man stuck in time and Dazzler stuck in space! Elektra lives, Yellowjacket dies! The FF if they never got powers and Nova if he never lost them! Mortals, mutants and monsters - plus early yet brief resurrections of Phoenix and Captain Marvel, along with many other alternate oddities! All part of Marvel's sixth collection of quantum continuity! Secrets of past, future and sideways revealed! Featuring Howard the Duck, Obnoxio the Clown, Aunt May and more!

Collects What If? (1977) 36-38, 40-42, 44-47. More alternate-reality questions are answered! Imagine a world where the Fantastic Four never gained their powers — or one where Stephen Strange never became Master of the Mystic Arts! Consider the fates of the Thing and the Beast if they continued to mutate — or Spider-Man if Uncle Ben had lived! The Hulk goes berserk, Susan Richards dies in childbirth, Nova makes a life-changing decision and Galactus turns the Silver Surfer back into Norrin Radd! But what if Loki had found Mjolnir before his brother — and what if the Marvel Universe ceased to exist?! Plus: Thought-provoking tales featuring Daredevil, the Sub-Mariner, the Avengers and more!

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction A harvest and not a winnowing, this volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short fiction that John Updike wrote between 1953 and 1975. “How rarely it can be said of any of our great American writers that they have been equally gifted in both long and short forms,” reads the citation composed for John Updike upon his winning the 2006 Rea Award for the Short Story. “Contemplating John Updike’s monumental achievement in the short story, one is moved to think of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps William Faulkner—writers whose reputations would be as considerable, or nearly, if short stories had been all that they had written. From [his] remarkable early short story collections . . . through his beautifully nuanced stories of family life [and] the bittersweet humors of middle age and beyond . . . John Updike has created a body of work in the notoriously difficult form of the short story to set beside those of these distinguished American predecessors. Congratulations and heartfelt thanks are due to John Updike for having brought such pleasure and such illumination to so many readers for so many years.”

Five Little Peppers and How They Grew Margaret Sidney - Times are tough around the little brown house! The widowed Mrs. Pepper has to sew all day long just to earn enough to pay the rent and to feed the five growing Peppers. But she faces poverty and trouble with a stout heart, a smiling face, and the help of her jolly brood: blue-eyed Ben, the eldest and the man of the house at the age of 11; pretty Polly, so eager to cook for the family and make everyone happy and comfortable; and the three littlest Peppers, Joel, Davie, and baby Phronsie.A favorite of children, parents, and teachers for generations, this heartwarming classic first appeared in 1880. Since then, it has inspired countless young imaginations with its tender tales of the ways in which courage and good cheer can overcome adversity.

The Persephone Theory By: Namir Thompson The Persephone Theory is one of the most interesting stories to read and by far one of the best books to mix comedy with horror and history. The Persephone Theory begins with the Greek myth coming to life as the goddess of harvest and fertility, Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is taken by her uncle Hades to live in the underworld to become its queen, but is allowed to live amongst the humans possessing the one called Persephone. This Persephone is argent to those who love and hate her, and make all who stand in her way pay with their own blood. Persephone, mad at existence, leaves her children behind to face their own demands and are granted everlasting life. The children of Persephone roam on Earth, daring any and everything to stop them or die trying. They leave the message that power is being abused, people are being used as puppets, and that life is an everlasting cycle of rebirth and vengeance.