When the United States declared war on Germany and Japan in 1941, Ernest Hemingway did not immediately travel to Europe as a journalist, as he had for the Spanish Civil War. Instead, he stuck around Havana, where he drank (Scotch and sodas, daiquiris) and went fishing. In a grandiose and ultimately ineffectual manner, he also devoted time to the Allied cause, hunting enemy submarines in a wooden fishing boat called the Pilar.

Hemingway’s biographers have largely ignored this period in his life. Kenneth S. Lynn, for instance, devotes just two pages to the U-boat gambit in his nearly six-hundred-page

Born in a storm and named after the biblical son of thunder, John Devine is delivered into a world of mythology: smalltown Ireland. He begins his days eking out a frugal, rural existence, dominated by his charismatic chainsmoking mother, Lily, and their faintly sinister neighbours, the sharp-tongued Phyllis Nagle and "mutton-headed" Harry Farrell, alcoholic handyman. With only a Harper's Compendium of Bizarre Nature Facts as distraction, John grows up an odd kid, nurturing an obsession with parasitic worms and nightmares about crows.

What is an anthology? It is always a little too much and a bit too little. Too much, I mean, in particularly physical terms. The anthologies I own — "The Oxford Anthology of British Literature," "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" — are prodigious volumes, not the little bouquets of verse denoted by the Greek anthologia. I leave them on my shelves. Sometimes, when I want to exert myself, I go over to where they sit next to the dictionaries and the grammarian handbooks. Otherwise, they sit dusty while I type something into Google. In the Internet Age, the weight of words has ripened

Vertigo, a DC Comics label active since 1993, has long specialized in a particular type of fantasy comic, grounded in contemporary realism but with an eye toward timeless stories. This is the stuff of popular, writer-driven series like The Sandman and Fables, literary-minded accumulations of myth and folklore in which tales interact with one another, although the style also runs through more acidly critical works, ranging from the lurid socioreligious inquiry of Preacher to the flickering streetwise political awareness of Hellblazer.

Jeff Lemire both writes and draws his work, and his take on