Major Sky Masters leads American space exploration.

Tales to Astonish tells the spectacular life and times of Jack Kirby, the legendary forefather of American comic books. In the 1960's, Kirby joined with Stan Lee to develop many of our best-known and most beloved superheroes, including the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, the Avengers, and the Silver Surfer. Ronin Ro chronicles Kirby's poverty-stricken origins in New York's Lower East Side, his early commercial triumphs and failures, his renowned partnership with Lee, and his revolutionary artistic innovations, tracing the comic book industry from its inauspicious beginnings to its sensational successes. Ronin Ro lives in New York City and is the author of Gangsta: Merchandising the Rhymes of Violence, the award-winning international bestseller Have Gun Will Travel, and the novel Street Sweeper. He has written for Vanity Fair, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Herald, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Spin. "Ro cleanly lays out Kirby's story...He does well by the facts."-The Onion "Ro deftly handles Kirby's relationships...Tales to Astonish celebrates the stubbornness that kept Kirby, a superhero of comic books in his own right, creative as if against his will."-San Francisco Chronicle Also available: HC 1-58234-345-4 $24.95

"... very well translated... Cardenal merits praise for presenting, on such an ambitious scale, a passionate alternative history of the Spanish encounter with Central America." --Booklist "Combining hsitory with poetry, Cardenal exposes the violence, treachery, injustice, and exploitation that are so much a part of Central America and Mexico's] past and present." --World Literature Today "Explore this dense, beautiful poem and you will be rewarded with riches that 'delight and hurt not'." --Nicaragua Update "... a remarkable text.... El estrecho dudoso is a masterful and compelling poetic account of early colonial Central America, and the translation is likewise masterful." --Colonial Latin American Historical Review In this book-length poem, Nicaraguan priest and revolutionary Ernesto Cardenal tells the story of the Spanish conquest of Central America from the "discovery" of the American continent to recent historical events. A remarkable achievement and an engrossing narrative, the poem is published here in both Spanish and English.