Word: stine
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Just a couple of years ago, R.L. Stine was the most popular children's author in publishing history. He sometimes received 2,000 letters a week from his readers, and young fans mobbed his appearances at bookstores, eager to glimpse the scary grownup, dressed all in black, who churned out monthly novels for creepy series called Goosebumps (aimed at readers 8 to 12) and Fear Street (10 to 14), which in turn led to scads of merchandising goodies, a hit kids' TV show on the Fox network and an exhibit at Disney World...
Then, something appropriately eerie happened to Stine. He didn't exactly disappear or, as a Goosebumps book might put it, Vanish without a trace! (It's hard to be invisible when there are more than 300 million copies of your books in print.) But he did all of a sudden turn pretty ectoplasmic, a ghost of best sellers past, bumping around in the publishing basement, listening to the patter of tiny feet as his millions of former readers rushed to buy the latest Harry Potter...
...Stine, 56, could easily have rested on his residuals and remarkable achievement. He is enshrined in the Guinness World Records 2000 Millennium Edition as the author of the world's top-selling children's series. At the peak of his fame, he realized that the success of Goosebumps and Fear Street was transitory. "Kids move on," he told an interviewer for the New York Times in 1995. "In 10 years, they won't be buying these books anymore. They'll be into something else. I think I'll be doing some other things...
This much had long been known from the Icelandic sagas, but until 1960 there was no proof of Leif's American sojourns. In retrospect, it is astonishing that the evidence took so long to be found. That year Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, went to Newfoundland to explore a place identified on an Icelandic map from the 1670s as "Promontorium Winlandiae," near the small fishing village of L'Anse aux Meadows, in the province's northern reaches. They were certain that it marked the location of an ancient Norse settlement...
...admirable mastery ofthe vignette. City of Angles consists offragmented tableaux like those of a film, whereeach scene is stylistically and convincinglyexecuted. In fact, the achievement of directorPete Wilson '99 lies in his sensitive productionof the divisions in the script. What could wellhave been a technical nightmare-the disparaterealities of Stine and Stone-is slickly overcomewith juxtapositions, stop-action andinstant-reverse stage-play. At points, the setsand music are manipulated with skill to slip fromone world to another. It is the generalprofessionalism of the production that makes theever-present mic trouble annoying in contrast. Infull, this production demonstrates a very strongconceptual...