[caption id="attachment_251722" align="alignleft" width="354"] Anne Rice & Richard Wolinsky, 2016[/caption]

Anne Rice died of a stroke on December 11, 2021. This career-ranging interview was recorded on December 2, 2016 at Books Inc. in Opera Plaza in San Francisco, while she was on tour for her latest novel, "Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis."

Anne Rice achieved success in 1976 with her novel "Interview with the Vampire," which spawned a series of novels titled "The Vampire Chronicles" and became a world-wide phenomenon. Along the way, she also wrote several other novels including the Mayfair Witches trilogy, Cry to Heaven, a series of books under pseudonyms, and the screenplay for "Interview with the Vampire" was turned into a successful film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

By 2003, she’d written ten novels in the Vampire Chronicles and took a break, writing novels on the life of Jesus, on angels, and on werewolves. In 2014, she returned to her vampire hero, Lestat, with Prince Lestat. Prince Lestat and the Realm of Atlantis was the second in this latest series.

Since the interview was recorded, Anne Rice published one more Lestat novel, Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat in 2018, which is her last solo novel to date, though it’s possible there are more to come. There are two novels written in collaboration with her son, novelist Christopher Rice, sequels to her 1989 novel Ramses the Damned. The Passion of Cleopatra was released in 2017 and The Reign of Osiris is scheduled for 2022. In gestation since the time of this 2016  interview, new television series based on the Mayfair Witches and The Vampire Chronicles have passed through several hands, and are now being developed by AMC.