—-Press release, all media. HOLD for release until 1 April 2014——
WHAT’S IN A NAME
Few, even staunchest, fans of Anne Rice’s classic bestseller Interview with the Vampire will know that book that started off Lestat’s legendary odyssey originally had a slightly different title. Running up to the publication of Prince Lestat, a cover mock-up of the first edition with the original title was released, signed by Anne Rice herself.
From a recent interview with her editor at the time: “While Anne’s title was catchy, to the point, we felt at the time that we had to make a statement with the title. For almost a century Bram Stoker’s Dracula had been the mold for the literary vampire, and with her sexy, tragic vampire Lestat, Anne changed all that. We felt that Lestat was not any old vampire, but the new vampire for a whole new generation. And that’s why it’s not an interview with A vampire, but with THE vampire!”
Anne Rice’s vampire books have never been out of print, and a new novel round Lestat will appear this autumn – testament that Lestat is not only the vampire for the generation of readers in the ’70s, but for any generation!
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WOW!! TL;DR, no really, you should read this. DID YOU KNOW there was an alternate title for IWTV?!!
“I guess no one mentioned that unspoken rule to: Mel Brooks, Oscar Wilde, Marquis de Sade, Joe Masteroff, Jonathan Swift, Willam Shakespeare, Ambrose Bierce, Voltaire or a host of others.”
❝Writing reprehensible pro’s such as that does not condone them into being made as a joke, monsieur. All of whom you have listed, myself included, did not do so for that reason. Such scenarios exist and I personally used them to extract that very notion, not to make fun of it.❞
“But those are things that you just don’t make jokes about in general.”
We as a culture need to be able to read and write and talk about things that are uncomfortable/unsavory/illegal/bad/etc. Those are ways of dealing with them. There’s a fine line sometimes, but better to unpack them than pretend that they don’t exist or assume that ceasing discussion of them will prevent them from happening anymore.
