tagged w/ anne rice
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Iconic author Anne Rice has not fallen from grace, nor has she given up on the concept of faith. The famed chronicler of vampires is now singing the angelic Songs of the Seraphim, which continues with her new novel, 'Of Love and Evil.' After announcing her defection from the Catholic Church this summer, Rice certainly galvanized her legion of fans (and the media) for valid reasons. But it has done little to temper her own beliefs or creativity. Rice arrives at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena tomorrow, December 13, to meet the loyal.
http://www.examiner.com/personalities-in-los-angeles/anne-rice-brings-her-talk-of-angels-and-of-love-evil-to-pasadena-on-12-13Iconic author Anne Rice has not fallen from grace, nor has she given up on the concept... more
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July 30th, 2010
11:03 AM ET
Anne Rice leaves Christianity
Legendary author Anne Rice has announced that she’s quitting Christianity.
The “Interview with a Vampire” author, who wrote a book about her spirituality titled "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession" in 2008, said Wednesday that she refuses to be “anti-gay,” “anti-feminist," “anti-science” and “anti-Democrat.”
Rice wrote, “For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian ... It's simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”
Rice then added another post explaining her decision on Thursday:
“My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me," Rice wrote. "But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been or might become.”July 30th, 2010
11:03 AM ET
Anne Rice leaves Christianity
Legendary author Anne... more
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Novelist Anne Rice says she's quit being a Christian but hanging on to Christ. She's just fed up with his followers.
The author, whose vampire books were huge sellers long before Twilight and whose return to her childhood Catholicism dominated her more recent works, posted a series of comments on Facebook(confirmed by her publisher as authentic, according to Associated Press).
For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.
The mother of openly gay novelist Christopher Rice goes on to say:
I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
In a USA TODAY profile of Anne and Christopher,Rice talked about growing up Catholic, drifting away as a teen, and marrying an atheist. After the death of a young daughter, she began writing her vampire books,
...about lost souls looking for answers, so in a sense I was always on this journey back. I do get people saying, "How can you be such a fool to believe in God?' I sense many are young Goth kids who feel abandoned. I just say, look, you're looking for the same things that I was, transcendence and redemption. I found what my characters were looking for."
Even now, as she tosses off organized religion, Rice posts that she's still
... an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God... Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.
Stay tuned to see if official web site drops its links to the conservative Catholic broadcasting Eternal Word Network.
Can you reject religion and hang on to God?
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2010/07/anne-rice-catholic-/1?csp=34Novelist Anne Rice says she's quit being a Christian but hanging on to Christ.... more
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From faith to atheism back to faith
April 14, 7:44 PMHouston Roman Catholic Examiner Vanessa Barnes
ANNE RICE, a Texan by way of New Orleans and California has lived an author’s dream. In the world’s eyes she is wildly successful and has garnered worldwide acclaim with over 28 published books. Her first novel was 'Interview with the Vampire', 1976 and her latest is ‘Angel Time’, 2009.
After unexpectedly coming across the inspiring movement ‘I Am Second’via a video, I was compelled to learn and read more; first about Anne Rice the fascinating person and secondly about Anne Rice the obviously talented and celebrated writer.
As an author myself, I am always drawn to the inner workings of other authors; what makes them tick and what makes them create the way they do. To study the one before me is to be inspired so that through my writing I may in turn, inspire the one after me—which is why ‘I Am Second’ spoke to me.
I can only dream of having 29 published books before the end of my life; but hey, that’s all in God’s plan book so I’ll save that for another day. As it is, I relish this time sharing with you the readers of Examiner.com those events and thoughts that always move me to an internal and spiritually positive place; Anne Rice’s testimony does that for me.
Though I know it is not entirely the case, as a Catholic I often wonder what makes me and others like me, willfully and faithfully remain Catholic in light of the scandals permeating our lives. I cannot answer that question for anyone but myself. Let me just say I did not become and do not remain a Catholic based upon man but upon God alone. I will also save that for another day.
Nevertheless, the fact that Mrs. Rice, who was born a Catholic and subsequently made the decision to live many years as an atheist and later found herself spiritually drawn back to the Catholic faith convinces me that God alone, not man, is the one in control of all of us.
In her words from her website: “As many of you know, in 1998 I returned to the Catholic Church. After years of pondering and searching, the great gift of faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ, as Our Savior, came back to me on a December afternoon, and I went home to the church of my childhood, becoming a member and supporter of it with my whole soul.
In 2002, I experienced another transformation. While sitting in Church, talking to the Lord, I realized that the greatest thing I could do to show my complete love for Him was to consecrate my work to Him --- to use any talent I had acquired as a writer, as a storyteller, as a novelist --- for Him and for Him alone.
I walked out of the church a changed person. I felt that I had consecrated myself to the Lord in whom I completely believed. Thence began my journey into intense Biblical study, intense historical research, and intense effort to write novels about the Jesus of Scripture, the Jesus of Faith, in His own vibrant First Century World.
Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt, was the first novel to appear. Christ the Lord, the Road to Cana is the second. “
She says further, “I offer these novels to all Christians. And I offer them to all those who have ever enjoyed or valued my earlier books. Please understand: they are fiction, but they are fiction that seeks to bring the reader closer to the Lord in whom my life belongs. You will find no watering down of the gospels in these novels. You will find no modern twists. I am a believer in every word of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
I have learned from the Anne Rice story and from life itself that we each must walk out our personal journey and be answerable individually to the one true God. In the end it really is what matters most.
Whatever gifts we have been blessed to posses are given us by our Lord to be used for the good of mankind. It may have taken Anne Rice some time to succumb to such a realization, however she did not balk when the call from the Holy Spirit became loud and clear; and I believe neither should I.
Thank You Anne Rice for sharing and inspiring.
Thank you my readers for taking the time to visit.From faith to atheism back to faith
April 14, 7:44 PMHouston Roman Catholic... more
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http://www.slate.com/id/2228717/pagenum/all/
You could be forgiven for thinking we're in the midst of an unprecedented madness for vampires. "True Blood Season Premiere Looking to Capitalize Off of Vampire Craze," headlined the Associated Press in June. "CW joins vampire trend with 'Diaries'," announced the Philadelphia Inquirer last week. The Hartford Courant asks, "Why Vampires Now?"
A better question might be, why vampires ever? Looking back, it's hard to think of a period when we weren't in the middle of a vampire craze. In the late 1970s, Anne Rice started raking in the money with Interview With the Vampire, and movies like Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre and the comedy Love at First Bite were critical hits. Then came The Lost Boys, Near Dark, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Innocent Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie), four more Anne Rice books, and Interview With the Vampire (the movie)—which could all be lumped into a rage for vampires that lasted clear through from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Vampires were back again in the mid-1990s, with Buffy (the TV show), the Blade movies, Southern Vampire Mysteries (the book series), and From Dusk Till Dawn. And now we've arrived at the highly touted mid- to late-2000s vogue of Underworld, Twilight (books and movies), True Blood (based on Southern Vampire Mysteries), and The Vampire Diaries.
So perhaps instead of talking about vampire crazes, we should really be talking about vampire droughts. The brief, anomalous periods when few or perhaps even no vampire movies, books, or TV shows are produced at all. The Garlic Years.
To figure out whether there really have been any vampire-free periods, we dug through online compendiums, from Wikipedia to obsessive fan sites like the Vampire Library, and compiled a list of the most important vampire-related books, films, and TV shows of the last half-century. In total, we included 169 movies, 106 books, and 62 seasons' worth of TV.
The Garlic Years, 1960-65: Vampires seemed to be enjoying a lot of momentum going into the '60s, after Christopher Lee's classic 1958 portrayal in Horror of Dracula. But that momentum quickly died. The Count wouldn't even make an appearance in the 1960 follow-up Brides of Dracula. There were no notable vampire movies for the next three years—other than the Italian film Black Sabbath, a trio of shorts that included one vampire storyline. Even the exhaustive compendiums of vampire literature list only a handful of obscure books and stories from this period.
… and the resurrection: Lee returned to the cape and fangs for the 1966 sequel Dracula: Prince of Darkness, in which the undead aristocrat is resurrected by his loyal servant Klove. That same year, ABC debuted the spooky soap opera Dark Shadows and quickly brought in a vampire character named Barnabas Collins to boost ratings. After Prince of Darkness, vampires started invading all sorts of genres, from blaxploitation—1972's Blacula—to the TV crime drama Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a short-lived X-Files prototype about a newspaper reporter who investigates supernatural cases. The highlight of this era was inarguably the debut of Count von Count on Sesame Street in 1972.
The Garlic Years, 1975-76: By the middle of the decade, the fad had run out of scream. There were no notable movies in either 1975 or 1976, and Kolchak was canceled after one season when even the lead actor requested a merciful death for the show.
… and the resurrection: Stephen King and Anne Rice to the rescue. The up-and-coming King published Salem's Lot in 1975, and Rice followed with Interview With the Vampire the next year. While these books were published during the Garlic Years, the craze they set off would not pick up until 1977, with the releases of Count Dracula, Rabid, and Martin. Meanwhile, the vampire mega-series became an established form: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro published the first of almost two dozen Saint-Germain novels in 1978. King soon moved on to other subjects, but Rice would stick with vampires for 30 years before switching to Jesus in 2005.
The Garlic Years, 1980-84: Any period that saw the conception, production, and release of a film called Gayracula ("He'll suck you dry!") holds promise. Unfortunately, that was one of only three major vampire films in the early 1980s—the other two being The Monster Club and The Hunger—amid a handful of forgettable novels. Apparently the '80s sucked less than reported.
… and the resurrection: Two works jolted the vampire world out of its Reagan-era funk: Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat in 1985 and Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys in 1987. The former bridged the 18-year gap between the book and movie versions of Interview With the Vampire, while Schumacher's film helped establish the teen-vamp genre that would make Buffy possible. (Without Corey Haim and Corey Feldman, there is no Sarah Michelle Geller.)
The Garlic Year, 1997: In any other decade, this year would have been solid for vamps. But set against the fangtastic '90s, it looks like a slump. Only one vampire movie was released in 1997 (Vampire Journals, no relation to The Vampire Diaries) and only one book was published (Dracula the Undead). Both of these occupy special places on nobody's shelf. The exception to the rule, of course: TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted that March. So even this Garlic Year contained the seed of many bountiful harvests to come.
… and the resurrection: Buffy kicked off the longest vampire surge yet, opening the door to Blade, the Underworld films, John Carpenter's Vampires, Van Helsing, and the multimedia blockbuster Twilight series. By any measure, 2006 was the vampirest year of all time.
So where does this leave us? Let's just say that now may not be the time to bankroll that production of Gayracula 2: Return of the Manpire. If history is any guide, these plush times of vampire mania will soon end with a run of atrocious imitations, followed by a few years of peace and quiet. Don't despair if it happens again. They'll be back.http://www.slate.com/id/2228717/pagenum/all/
You could be forgiven for thinking... more
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Anne Rice is considered one of the best author for all things on the supernatural, particularly vampires. In a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, Rice discusses her current projects, what it has been like to go from writing books on the supernatural to Christianity; how the new books are going through the same prejudice that the vampire stories went through, and last but not least, 'The Twilight Saga' and its appeal to younger women and how the different level of maturity in girls vs. boys plays a role in the appeal of a protective vampire.
Rice on the problem with prejudice: "Only some of my readers are reluctant to read my Christian-themed books, and the reason they give in emails to me is that they don’t want to read anything Christian. They are resisting the Christian books pretty much the way people resisted my earlier supernatural books, on the basis of the theme. Of course I want to say, look, these are novels, and you might be surprised how they work. Give them a try. My “vampire” novels had to overcome this kind of prejudice and gradually they did. I trust my newer Christian-oriented books will win the battle too."
Rice's thoughts on 'The Twilight Saga': "No, I haven’t read any of the Twilight series, but I did see the film. I felt that it reflected the deep desire of young women to have the mystery and protection and wisdom of older men. I think many girls mature much earlier than boys, and they are frustrated when they approach young boys for love or protection. Hence the fantasy of a wise and protective vampire coming into the life of a young girl who, of course, appreciates him in a special way."Anne Rice is considered one of the best author for all things on the supernatural,... more
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A better question might be, why vampires ever? Looking back, it's hard to think of a period when we weren't in the middle of a vampire craze. In the late 1970s, Anne Rice started raking in the money with Interview With the Vampire, and movies like Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre and the comedy Love at First Bite were critical hits. Then came The Lost Boys, Near Dark, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Innocent Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie), four more Anne Rice books, and Interview With the Vampire (the movie)—which could all be lumped into a rage for vampires that lasted clear through from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Vampires were back again in the mid-1990s, with Buffy (the TV show), the Blade movies, Southern Vampire Mysteries (the book series), and From Dusk Till Dawn. And now we've arrived at the highly touted mid- to late-2000s vogue of Underworld, Twilight (books and movies), True Blood (based on Southern Vampire Mysteries), and The Vampire Diaries.
So perhaps instead of talking about vampire crazes, we should really be talking about vampire droughts. The brief, anomalous periods when few or perhaps even no vampire movies, books, or TV shows are produced at all. The Garlic Years.
To figure out whether there really have been any vampire-free periods, we dug through online compendiums, from Wikipedia to obsessive fan sites like the Vampire Library, and compiled a list of the most important vampire-related books, films, and TV shows of the last half-century. In total, we included 169 movies, 106 books, and 62 seasons' worth of TV.
It turns out there were indeed a few periods—four, to be precise—where the vampire genre seemed to hit a mini-recession. Here's a rundown of each dry spell and the vampire works that brought the genre back from the dead.A better question might be, why vampires ever? Looking back, it's hard to think... more
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Rumour has it Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles are making there way to the big screen again, and Universal are looking to a certain Mr. Downey Jr to get his teeth into Lestat de Lioncourt...Rumour has it Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles are making there way to the big... more
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Universal is looking to reboot the cinematic incarnation of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles.
The first book in the series was "Interview with the Vampire", and I’d imagine a purist-pleasing reboot would start there, though I don’t really expect that to be the case here.
Even though Interview and "Queen of the Damned" were Warner Bros. films, they’re still fresh in the memory and frequent enough on cable that they’re also far from being forgotten. I don’t think Universal will try something so daft as fully rebooting a series that’s still alive in the mind of the public.Universal is looking to reboot the cinematic incarnation of Anne Rice’s The... more
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It's Halloween, and Anne Rice has a new book -- a memoir, in fact -- that's climbing best-seller lists. Everything is normal, then.
Normal if it were 1994 -- the height of Rice's megaselling fame as a queen of Southern Gothic pulp.
For those who haven't been paying attention lately to vampire lit, America's most famous chronicler of bloodsuckers doesn't live in New Orleans anymore -- and hasn't since before Hurricane Katrina hit -- and she's riding new waves of enthusiasm: the memoir and Christian lit.
Her memoir, "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession," is the latest piece of evidence that Rice is reinventing herself in an attempt to build a reputation as a serious Christian writer.
In the memoir, the 67-year-old writer doesn't disavow the two decades she spent churning out books on vampires, demons and witches -- with a batch of S&M erotica thrown in -- following the breakout success of her first novel in 1976, "Interview With the Vampire."
The memoir follows the release of two books in a planned four-part, first-person chronicle of the life of Jesus.
And in this new 245-page memoir, Rice presents her former life as vampire writer as that of a soul-searching wanderer in the deserts of atheism; as someone akin to her most famous literary creations -- Lestat, her "dark search engine," Louis the aristocrat-turned-vampire and Egyptian Queen Akasha, "the mother of all vampires."
"I do think that those dark books were always talking about religion in their own way. They were talking about the grief for a lost faith," she said.
Yet, religion had to come back into her life, she writes. For her, it was something she'd have to face up to again like an absent parent or a long-lost love child or Banquo the ghost in "Macbeth."
Always over-the-top and beyond the rational, she writes that her return of faith was preceded by a series of epiphanies -- many while on travels to Europe's cathedrals, Israel and Brazil. In one episode, when she visited the giant Jesus statue above Rio de Janeiro, she writes that she felt "delirium" as the clouds broke and revealed the statue.
In the memoir, Rice describes a familiar Catholic upbringing imbued with opulence and mystery. The incense. The statuary. The stained glass. The darkness. She learned the world, she writes, through her senses, through a "preliterate" understanding of the world. She writes that she possessed "an internal gallery of pictorial images" that, lamentably, was replaced "by the alphabetic letters" she learned later.
In a sense, the memoir also is a confessional about her struggle as a writer to be a reader, a thinker and an author with a distinct literary style. Her stories often are reveries with no end in sight -- and all too often ugly with pedantic unwinding, numbing in detail and overly simplistic, a pastiche of cliches.
Her turn in direction -- from vampire fiction to Christian musings -- still isn't winning the critics over.
In The New York Times, Christopher Buckley slammed Rice's memoir as "a crashing, mind-numbing bore. This is the literary equivalent of waterboarding."
And the bar is high when it comes to writing about Jesus.
Rice isn't out to impress the critics, though.
"My objective is simple: It's to write books about our Lord living on Earth that make him real to people who don't believe in him; or people who have never really tried to believe in him," she said.
She pressed the point: "I mean, I've made vampires believable to grown women. Now, if I can do that, I can make our Lord Jesus Christ believable to people who've never believed in him. I hope and pray."
Rice is busy writing about Jesus as a minister. And that's a tall order, Rice said.
It's Halloween, and Anne Rice has a new book -- a memoir, in fact -- that's... more
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By Nicole
Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice is relenting on her vow to abandon her blood sucking characters, and is considering writing one more novel in the series which features the enigmatic Brat Prince of Vampires, Lestat.
The first novel in the Vampire Chronicles series, Interview with the Vampire, was completed the year after the death of Rice's six year old daughter, who succumbed to leukemia in 1972. The novel sold over 8 million copies and spawned a film, which featured Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Christian Slater and Kirsten Dunst (who played the eternally 5-year old child vampire Claudia). After the death of her poet husband in 2002, Rice published her final novel concerning the black arts, Blood Canticle. In 2003, Rice, who along with her husband had been a self-described atheist, returned to the Catholic faith in which she'd been raised, and set a new course in her writing with a fictionalized Christ taking the central role in her subsequent novels (Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana).
"I never stopped grieving," said Rice on the loss of her faith and her first child during a 2006 Kindling Muse interview. Rice also spoke about how the melancholy plight of the vampires in her chronicles paralleled the loss of light she felt in her own life. But now, after finding spiritual redemption herself, Rice hopes to find the same in her writing for Lestat. "I have one more book that I would really like to write," said Rice in a Time.com interview published this past Sunday. "It will be a story that I need to tell."
After being inundated with emails, Rice wrote an open letter to her fans. "Yes, I am contemplating one last novel involving the Vampire Lestat, and the Talamasca, the fictional organization I created years ago in the Vampire novels," says Rice. "The novel, if ever written, would be entirely Christian in framework and would involve Redemption. It would affirm my dedication to Christ and my belief in Him and my commitment to write only for Him."
By Nicole
Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice is relenting on her vow to abandon... more
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