Nexus is back--and this time the galactic judge, jury, and executioner is stalking history's most dangerous killer--Clayborn--across time itself! But when justice comes at an enormous personal cost to Nexus himself, can the Merc's chosen champion still do what's right? Collecting Nexus: Into the Past, Nexus: Bad Moon Rising, Nexus: Infestation, and Nexus: The Insect Under the Stone from Dark Horse Presents #12-#15, #23-#26 and #29-#34!

Nexus is back--and this time the galactic judge, jury, and executioner is stalking history's most dangerous killer--Clayborn--across time itself! But when justice comes at an enormous personal cost to Nexus himself, can the Merc's chosen champion still do what's right? Collecting Nexus: Into the Past, Nexus: Bad Moon Rising, Nexus: Infestation, and Nexus: The Insect Under the Stone from Dark Horse Presents #12-#15, #23-#26 and #29-#34!

Something long dormant beneath the surface of Ylum comes alive, triggering a visit from the planet-devouring Gourmando and his mysterious ally. With powers far beyond those of even Nexus himself, this unstoppable being banishes Nexus to an unknown realm--and the only way out is to face one's worst fears! Mike Baron and Steve Rude deliver a new Nexus adventure in this special collection that also includes the newly-remastered "Nexus: The Origin" comic and the classic Rude hand-painted Sundra story, "When She was Young."

Two wives share a house divided. A writer writes himself a sexy new partner. A backseat driver's trapped. An elevator runs out of floors. And clothes control the man. Short, sharp jabs into your mind. Philosophical sci-fi quick reads. 17 pages.

Steve Almond, the man whose candy jones fueled the bestseller Candyfreak, returns with a collection of stories that both seals his reputation as a master of the modern form and risks getting him arrested. The cast of characters in The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories includes a wealthy family certain they have been abducted by space aliens, a sexy magazine editor who falls for a worldclass cad, and a beleaguered dentist who refuses to read his best friend’s novel. Michael Jackson and Abraham Lincoln make cameos, as do a variety of desperate and beautiful loonies, all of whom are laid bare, often literally. In these twelve stories, Almond refuses to let his characters off the hook, or to abandon them, until we have seen the full measure of ourselves within their struggle.

The divisions that mark my subject are three. The first is that point where the world begins--where it appears from out of the mystery of non-being. The second lies somewhere between its progeny and its future--the times between beginnings and ends where we, the beneficiaries of our being-here, come together to sing a celebration of the wonder that it happened at all, and then intone the fear of its ending. The third division is a speculation on ends--our own and the ending of the world. I use these divisions to locate a something that comes from nothing onto a historical tradition that imposes a value on the progression of that something, and so requires a judgment on all that has passed. I first discuss these through religious attempts to invest life and history with purpose--for they form the major explanatory traditions of Western culture and are a thematic source of much of its greatest art. I continue with an art-critical approach where themes of process and purpose are located in artworks through their stylistic histories and ambitions. I indicate how present art, when open to reconstitute such themes, could change the nature of today's efforts to give art polemical purposes, and so provide new reasons for its making. I conclude with some stories, unevenly biographical, partly fictional, which I offer as parables for the developed themes and their transformations. This last aim is to elucidate a view of art as providing specific symbols for a cosmology of beginning, living, and ending.

An transdisciplinary exploration of narrative not just as a target for interpretation but also as a means for making sense of experience itself. With Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind, David Herman proposes a cross-fertilization between the study of narrative and research on intelligent behavior. This cross-fertilization goes beyond the simple importing of ideas from the sciences of mind into scholarship on narrative and instead aims for convergence between work in narrative studies and research in the cognitive sciences. The book as a whole centers on two questions: How do people make sense of stories? And: How do people use stories to make sense of the world? Examining narratives from different periods and across multiple media and genres, Herman shows how traditions of narrative research can help shape ways of formulating and addressing questions about intelligent activity, and vice versa. Using case studies that range from Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to sequences from The Incredible Hulk comics to narratives told in everyday interaction, Herman considers storytelling both as a target for interpretation and as a resource for making sense of experience itself. In doing so, he puts ideas from narrative scholarship into dialogue with such fields as psycholinguistics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive, social, and ecological psychology. After exploring ways in which interpreters of stories can use textual cues to build narrative worlds, or storyworlds, Herman investigates how this process of narrative worldmaking in turn supports efforts to understand—and engage with—the conduct of persons, among other aspects of lived experience.