Anne Rice is having more fun than ever. As we sit down to talk about her latest novel, 'Prince Lestat,' it seems clear that she's driven to explore new and uncharted territory. All she needs is a word processor and the worlds that she has created.
To be honest, I love talking to Anne Rice because she's just as enthusiastic as I am. She knows and loves her books and thinks deeply about what she does and how she does it. Of course, part of what she does is unthinking. She's one of the masters of reaching into her own vat of swirling emotions and sensibilities and pulling out a story, writing it up from nothing. She's summoning.
One of the themes we followed this time around is Anne's own changing sensibilities. When she got into the horror fiction business, she managed a neat trick. She turned her own grief and horror into novels that partook of the fantastic but didn't seem to.
Now, she's come to the point where she's mastered the fantasy and even the science fiction elements behind her novels. She doesn't go so far as to turn them into "hard SF," but she's pretty hard-headed in crafting plots that would play out in the real world. Her so-called supernatural vampires embrace science, and they need to.
You can hear Anne Rice having the time of her life discussing the movies based on her books, other authors in her realm, including the author of a rather well-known British fantasy series, and all things vampiric, spiritual, and neuroscientific by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
12-03-14 UPDATE:Podcast Update: Time to Read Episode 185: Anne Rice, 'Prince Lestat'
Click image for audio link.
Here's the one-hundred eighty-fifth episode of my series of podcasts, which I'm calling Time to Read, or when I warn the writer in advance, the lightning round. This is turning out to be really fun, and especially since I get to take on my game show host persona.
This week, I'm way behind, but who knows what the hell might happen. I am hoping to get back up and stumbling. I have lots of great books in the hopper to review and lots of great interviews to podcast.
My hope is that in under four minutes I can offer readers a concise review and an opportunity to hear the author read from or speak about the work. I'm hoping to offer a new one every week.
The one-hundred eighty-fifth episode is a look at Anne Rice and 'Prince Lestat.'
Maureen Corrigan So We Read On, Casey Walker Last Days in Shanghai, Ron Rash Something Rich and Strange, Nicholson Baker Traveling Sprinkler
While the podcast file title says three, this edition of Three Books With Alan Cheuse is actually Four. As w were gearing up, Alan mentioned Maureen Corrigan's book, 'So We Read On,' and we decided in the moment to add that to our list. I spoke with Corrigan about the book, which I really enjoyed, as did Alan. My review of it is here. My conversation with Corrigan is here.
We spoke next about a great new debut thriller, Casey Walker's 'Last Days in Shanghai.' I'm a sucker for any novel with Shanghai as the setting since my father was born there. (He ended up in the camp down the way from J. G. Ballard, and returned with the family to the States after the war.) This novel has a real, urgent feeling of zeitgeist that, added to the well-turned plot, makes it especially compelling.
We went on to a Ron Rash collection, sort of a "best of," titlde 'Something Rich and Strange.' It lives up to the title and the settings, mostly Appalachian. For me there was a strong Flannery O'Connor vibe to these stories. Cheuse and I spoke about short stories in general, supposedly not beloved of either publishers or readers, but nonetheless quite appealing in this Age of Limited Attention.
12-01-14:A 2014 Interview with Anne-Sylvie Salzman
Click image for audio link.
"You really have to enter a world and it's not some kind of guided tour."
— Anne-Sylvie Salzman
One of the great highlights of my trip to Europe was the opportunity to talk to Anne-Sylvie Salzman about the creation of the stories in her collection 'Darkscapes,' and discovering that she has a large body of yet un-translated work out there. As you can hear, she has a lot of published fiction that would sound must-buy-ish even if I hadn't read 'Darkscapes' and found it flat-out amazing, and horrifying.
Salzman is insightful when discussing her own work, but her insights in a more general sense offer a profound and unique sense of how the fantastic can be an essential building block of fine literature. Yet for all her literary inclinations, Salzman delivers solid stories that will just creep the hell out of you.
We talked about the weird in general and then covered most of the stories in the book. Some of these stories may get sequels, in itself news to rejoice. But over and over again, I found myself startled by how Salzman's perceptions of her own craft and process spoke to more general visions of writing both in and out of genre.
Given that Salzman's stories here are all pretty firmly in the horror genre, I was heartened to hear that her novels go father afield. We can only hope that they are translated sooner rather than later. In the interim, you can hear my conversation with Anne-Sylvie Salzman about what I feel is one of the best books of horror fiction in recent years by following this link to the MP3 file of our conversation.
New to the Agony Column
09-18-15: Commentary : William T. Vollman Amidst 'The Dying Grass' : An Epic Exploration of Simultaneity
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with William T. Vollman : "...a lot of long words that in our language are sentences..."
09-05-15: Commentary : Susan Casey Listens to 'Voices in the Ocean' : Science, Empathy and Self
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Susan Casey : "...the reporting for this book was emotionally difficult at times..."
08-21-15: Agony Column Podcast News Report : Senator Claire McCaskill is 'Plenty Ladylike' : Internalizing Determination to Overcome Sexism [Incudes Time to Read EP 211: Claire McCaskill, Plenty Ladylike, plus A 2015 Interview with Senator Claire McCaskill]
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Emily Schultz Unleashes 'The Blondes' : A Cure by Color [Incudes Time to Read EP 210: Emily Schultz, The Blondes, plus A 2015 Interview with Emily Schultz]
07-05-15: Commentary : Dr. Michael Gazzaniga Tells Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience Reveals the Life of Science
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Michael Gazzaniga : "We made the first observation and BAM there was the disconnection effect..."
04-21-15: Commentary : Kazuo Ishiguro Unearths 'The Buried Giant' : The Mist of Myth and Memory
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro : ".... by the time I was writing this novel, the lines between what was fantasy and what was real had blurred for me..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Marc Goodman : "...every physical object around us is being transformed, one way or another, into an information technology..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report UPDATE: Time to Read Episode 199: Marc Goodman : Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
