A best-selling author tells kids everything they ever wanted to know about him--and Goosebumps! What was R.L. Stine like as a kid? How did he start writing books? Where does he get all his scary ideas? These and many more questions are answered in this humorous, fast-paced biography. Photos, line drawings.

At the very end of the Ladies’ Frocks Departments, past Cocktail Frocks, there was something very special, something quite, quite wonderful; but it wasn’t for everybody: that was the point. Because there, at the very end, there was a lovely arch, on which was written in curly letters Model Gowns. Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, Ladies in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow. But it’s Sydney in the 1950s, and there’s still just enough time left on a hot and frantic day to dream and scheme... By the time the last marked-down frock has been sold, most of the staff of the Ladies’ Cocktail section at F. G. Goode’s have been launched into slightly different careers. With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence. Ladies in Black is a great novel, a lost Australian classic.

Landing a prestigious position as a Supreme Court clerk fresh out of Yale Law, Ben Addison is on the ultra-fast track to success—until he inadvertently shares a classified secret with the wrong listener. And now the anonymous blackmailer who made a killing with Ben's information is demanding more. Guilty of a criminal act, his golden future suddenly in jeopardy, Ben turns for help to his roommates—three close friends from childhood, each strategically placed near the seats of Washington power—and to his beautiful, whip-smart fellow clerk, Lisa Schulman. But trust is a dangerous commodity in the nation's capital. And when lives, careers, and power are at stake, loyalties can shatter like glass . . . and betrayals can be lethal.

"We cannot help wincing, cannot help feeling that the author has committed an error of taste, cannot help hoping with all the vigour at our command that his example will not be followed. [...] We are compelled by conviction to express in clear terms the disfavour with which we regard audacious enterprises such as the one undertaken by the author of this novel." -- The Literary World, May 25, 1900 "Richard Marsh, author of A Second Coming , is the author also of 'The Beetle' and 'The Crime and the Criminal.' This, therefore, is his third coming. If one wishes to read one of his books, let it be 'The Crime' or 'The Beetle.' It may be better than 'A Second Coming.' It cannot easily be worse." -- The Critic, July, 1900 A Second Coming (1900) was the first attempt at serious literature by popular novelist Richard Marsh, and when it was published by the influential London publisher Grant Richards, whose publishing house helped launched the careers of George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and James Joyce, it appeared Marsh was on his way toward success as a respected literary writer. But the reviews were uniformly negative, decrying the book as blasphemous, and Marsh's bold and fascinating work was declared a failure and quickly consigned to oblivion. In A Second Coming , Marsh imagines what would happen if the long-awaited second coming of Christ took place in present-day London. How would he be received in a modern, industrialized world that had begun to question the relevance of his teachings and had tacitly given up hope of his return? Surprising and thought-provoking, Marsh's novel and the questions it raises are perhaps as relevant as ever. This edition features the unabridged text of the novel, a reproduction of its original cover, and a new introduction by Paul Fox.