BOOKS AND BEIGNETS WITH GARY RICHARDS

The success of the ongoing horror television series based on Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has created renewed interest in Rice’s bestselling 1976 debut novel. Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941, spent most of her childhood and teenage years here, and returned to the city in her late 40s, leaving again in 2005. Upon her death in 2021 at the age of 80, Rice was returned to her beloved New Orleans and interred in Metairie Cemetery. Led by southern literary scholar Gary Richards, the 2025 breakfast book club will return to this iconographic work within the canon of vampire literature to explore its New Orleans setting and to meditate on its savvy, provocative use of vampirism as an extended metaphor for sexual otherness. Readers are invited to purchase and/or read the standard paperback version (ISBN 978-0345337665).