"Even at the very beginning of his crime-fighting career, the Batman has already seen plenty of humaninty's dark side-- but it's nothing compared to what is about to emerge, giggling, from the shadows: a grinning, chalk-faced figure whose madness threatens to overwhelm everything that stands in its way. For Gotham City's new defender, this first encounter with the creature called the Joker will be the ultimate trial by fire-- a battle that will define...

Three years have passed since Gustavo, a renowned psycholinguist, last spoke to his closest friend, Daniel, who has been interned in a psychiatric ward for murdering his fiancée. When Daniel unexpectedly calls to confess the truth behind the crime, Gustavo's long buried fraternal loyalty resurfaces and draws him into the center of a quixotic, unconventional investigation through an underground network of antiquarian dealers. While Daniel reveals...

"Batman: The Killing Joke is Alan Moore's unforgettable meditation on the razor-thin line between sanity and insanity, heroism and villainy, comedy and tragedy. One bad day is all it takes according to the grinning engine of madness and mayhem known as the Joker, that's all that separates the sane from the psychotic. Freed once again from the confines of Arkham Asylum, he's out to prove his deranged point. And he's going to use Gotham City's top cop,...

"Prisons and asylums developed in parallel in the United States as institutions dedicated to the quarantine, detention, and punishment of the socially marginal. A widely accepted popular narrative holds that deinstitutionalization from the 1950s to the 1990s diminished the role of asylums in America. Yet, as Anne E. Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die--in fact, many of its structures have been transformed into prisons, just as prisons have shifted...