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The 11 best Goosebumps monsters Writing at a breakneck pace, R.L. Stine churned out sixty-two Goosebumps. These are his best monsters.
It’s plain to see that 90s kid lit is enjoying a renaissance right now, and the king of the paperbacks back in the day was R. L. Stine. Writing at a breakneck pace, he churned out sixty-two mainline Goosebumps books as well as dozens of spin-offs and other titles. Stine’s series made horror accessible to audiences too young for R-rated fare, taking a variety of terror tropes and giving them young adult twists. With the second Jack Black-starring Goosebumps movie set to hit theaters, we pulled out the library card and reacquainted ourselves with the freaks and beasts of the original book series. Here are definitive picks for the eleven…
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11 short story collections that need to be in every bookshelf Ah, short stories — the lazy man’s novel. But so much harder to pull off.
Ah, short stories — the lazy man’s novel. Actually, that’s not true. In fact, a perfect short piece is, in many ways, much harder to pull off than a novel, where you have time and space to develop the narrative. Below are 11 collections that belong on any aspiring literary connoisseur’s bookshelf or toilet. Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Donald Barthelme (1971) While Raymond Carver was busy perfecting the art of realist suburban malaise, Donald Barthelme was going the other way, writing post-modern, deconstructionist short stories that would inspire subsequent generations of experimental writers with their non-sequitorial insanity. His first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, is as strange a book as…
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15 scientific ways reading makes you a better person Reading a good book is not only fun… it’s nothing short of life-changing. Let me explain.
We can now swipe through endless pages and pages on our tablets and phones. We have access to archives of online articles and news. And while it’s allowing us to read more than ever, there is still a difference between reading and reading books. According the The Telegraph, while reading is on the rise, quality of reading is on the decline. Reading your Facebook timeline isn’t the same as reading Tolstoy. It’s a shame, because reading a good book is not only fun; it’s nothing short of life-changing. Let me explain. Reading expands your vocabulary When staff at Rhode Island Hospital compared the “receptive” vocabulary (the number of words that…
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6 reasons the world may never recover from the Twilight franchise We can't let more Twilight happen.
It’s easy to laugh Twilight off as nothing more than watered down porn for middle school girls… but it is definitely no laughing matter. Twilight’s effect on the overall mental health of society is very real and very serious. We’ve chosen to ignore other serious threats to civilization, but this is a disaster that calls for the mobilization of efforts to stop Twilight. Teen pregnancy Chiseled werewolf abs and whiny vampires who look like the guy that brings the guitar and folk songs to a kegger make the reproductive organs of teenage girls go haywire. This has obviously resulted in an increase in teen pregnancies. Some of these pregnancies might…