The Witching Hour

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the first installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series! “Extraordinary . . . Anne Rice offers more than just a story; she creates myth.”—The Washington Post Book World Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, an intricate tale of evil unfolds. Moving through time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the Louis XIV’s France, and from the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, The Witching Hour is a luminous, deeply enchanting novel. The magic of the Mayfairs continues: THE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS

An enchanting, hypnotic trilogy of witchcraft, adventure, and romance from the beloved author of Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, The Mayfair Witches is a wondrous journey through the centuries, across the globe, and between the human and demonic worlds. Now all three novels in Anne Rice’s spellbinding series have been collected for the first time in this stunning eBook bundle: THE WITCHING HOUR LASHER TALTOS On the screened porch of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking. She belongs to a legendary dynasty of witches—a family that is itself haunted over the ages by a dangerous and seductive being named Lasher. Their story begins in our time, with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a brilliant neurosurgeon aware of her abilities but oblivious to her ancient line, finds the drowned body of Michael Curry off the coast of California and brings him to life. In his brief interval of death, he has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. Fiercely drawn to each other, Rowan and Michael set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, and an intricate tale of evil unfolds: an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn. Praise for Anne Rice and The Mayfair Witches “Behind all the velvet drapes and the gossamer winding sheets, this is an old-fashioned family saga. . . . Rice’s descriptive writing is so opulent that it almost begs to be read [by] candlelight.”—The Washington Post Book World “[A] huge and sprawling tale of horror.”—The New York Times Book Review “Lush prose, dense atmosphere, steamy sex, Gothic tension . . . Rice stages her scenes in a wide variety of times and locales, tapping deeply into the richest veins of mythology and history.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Spellbinding . . . mythical . . . Rice is a pure storyteller.”—Cosmopolitan “Rice sees things on a grand scale. . . . There is a wide-screen historical sweep to the tale as it moves from one generation of witches to the other.”—The Boston Globe “An intricate, stunning imagination.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “It is hard to praise sufficiently the originality of Miss Rice. . . . She has made a masterpiece of the morbid, worthy of Poe’s daughter.”—The Wall Street Journal

What do you do when you're new to a town where unexplainable things keep happening? Rosie moves to Middleton right after Mackie, a star on the high school football team, has died—and Mackie's death may have been his best friend Omar's fault. Rosie tries to help Omar get over his grief as the whole town blames him for the accident, but Mackie's ghost doesn't seem to be satisfied. What can they do to stop the haunting?

Everyone knows the devil is real. Everyone knows that witches exist. Everyone knows that saying the wrong thing can get you hanged . . . When fourteen-year-old Maggie's grandmother is accused of witchcraft, Maggie has to run for her life. But Scotland is in the grip of terror and Maggie runs straight into danger, falling into the hands of the English. Defying the king can be deadly, but falling in line is unthinkable. Maggie must learn to stand up for herself if she is to survive . . . The Witching Hour is a gripping tale of persecution in 17th century Scotland by Elizabeth Laird.

In a new and major novel, the creator of fantastic universes o vampires and witches takes us now into the world of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the destruction of Solomon's Temple, to tell the story of Azriel, Servant of the Bones. He is ghost, genii, demon, angel--pure spirit made visible. He pours his heart out to us as he journeys from an ancient Babylon of royal plottings and religious upheavals to Europe of the Black Death and on to the modern world. There he finds himself, amidst the towers of Manhattan, in confrontation with his own human origins and the dark forces that have sought to condemn him to a life of evil and destruction.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the second installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series! “[Anne] Rice’s descriptive writing is so opulent it almost begs to be read by candlelight.”—The Washington Post Book World In seventeenth-century Scotland, the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjured up the spirit she named Lasher—a creation that spelled her own destruction and torments each of her descendants. Now, the beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, must flee from this darkly brutal yet irresistible demon. The magic of the Mayfairs continues: THE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS

Nina Sadur, the playwright, occupies a prominent place in the Soviet/Russian drama pantheon of the 1980s and 1990s, a group that has with few exceptions been generally ignored by the Western literary establishment. The plays included in this volume offer some of Sadur's most influential works for the theater to the English-speaking audience for the first time. The collection will appeal to readers interested in Russian literature and culture, Russian theater, as well as women's literature. Sadur's plays are inspired by symbolist drama, the theater of the absurd and Russian folklore, yet are also infused with contemporary reality and populated by contemporary characters. Her work is overtly gynocentric: the fictional world construes women's traditionally downplayed concerns as narratively and existentially central and crucial. Sadur's drama has exerted a tremendous influence on contemporary Russian literature. Working essentially in isolation, Sadur was able to combine the early twentieth century dramatic discourse with that of the late Soviet era. Having built a bridge between the two eras, Sadur prepared the rise of the new Russian drama of the 2000s.

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