Anne Rice, página 6 de 18

A.N. RoquelaureBeauty has learned her lessons well. There are no pleasures that she hasn't given, no delights she hasn't known - but there can be no freedom for her. It means she must deny her body the joy it expects, the excitement it so desperately craves. Now as our story nears its end, Beauty meets the Prince of her dreams - the one man whose touch can release the torrential passions locked within her. And, as with the best of fairy tales, they are destined to live ecstatically ever after. Beauty's Release: her climactic adventure.

The second book in Anne Rice''s hugely ambitious and masterful life of Christ. It''s a winter of no rain, endless dust, and talk of trouble in Judea. All who know and love Jesus find themselves waiting for some sign of the path he will eventually take. After his baptism, he is at last ready to confront his destiny. At the wedding at Cana, he takes water and transforms it into red wine. Thus, he''s recognized as the anointed one and called by God the Father to begin a ministry that will transform an unsuspecting world.

Armand, el eterno joven agraciado con la cara de un ángel de Boticelli, viaja de su Kiev natal a Venecia. En la ciudad de los canales se deja cautivar por el vampiro Marius, un misterioso pintor. Pero las fuerzas del mal entra en escena y Armand se ve condenado a un eterno vagar que lo llevara a Paris del siglo XIX, y de alli, al Nuevo Orleans actual. Un recorrido en el que desvelara los detalles de su turbulenta existencia.

A.N. RoquelaureIf she's such a bad girl, perhaps it is time for her to start acting like one...Once the Prince's favourite pleasure - once the passionate plaything of his court - Beauty is being punished with banishment from that kingdom of carnal delights. But though Beauty's enchantment is over, her lessons in loving have only just begun...The further erotic adventures of Sleeping Beauty - in which Beauty discovers that punishment can be its own reward.

A.N. RoquelaureStep beyond the wall of your own imagination to the place where erotic enchantment lies...When Sleeping Beauty awakes at the Prince's kiss it is the beginning of our story, not the end. Once the prisoner of a spell, locked in the sleep of innocence - now she is the prisoner of sensual love, held fast by the magic of desire. Claimed by the Prince as the slave of his passions, Sleeping Beauty learns that tenderness and cruelty, pleasure and pain, longing and fulfilment are all one in the awesome kingdom of love. Beauty she is - but she is sleeping no more...

In this mesmerizing novel, the acclaimed author of THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES and the LIVES OF THE MAYFAIR WITCHES makes real for us the exquisite and otherworldly society of the eighteenth-century castrati, the delicate and alluring male sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices brought them the adulation of the royal courts and grand opera houses of Europe, men who lived as idols, concealing their pain as they were adored as angels, yet shunned as half-men. As we are drawn into their dark and luminous story, as the crowds of Venetians, Neopolitans, and Romans, noblemen and peasants, musicians, prelates, princes, saints, and intriguers swirl around them, Anne Rice brings us into the sweep of eighteenth-century Italian life, into the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. It is a novel that only Anne Rice could have written, taking us into a heartbreaking and enchanting moment in history, a time of great ambition and great sufferinga tale that challenges our deepest images of the masculine and the feminine. "To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinning through the mind of time." San Francisco Chronicle "Dazzling in its darkness...Spellbinding." The New York Times

In this novel, perennial bestseller Anne Rice fuses her two uniquely seductive strains of narrative -- her Vampire legend and her lore of the Mayfair witches -- to give us a world of classic deep-south luxury and ancestral secrets. Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, bright, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelganger, "Goblin," a spirit from a dream world that Quinn can''t escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a Vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelganger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself. As the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, from Quinn''s boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present day New Orleans, from ancient Athens to 19th-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the spectre that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds.

En esta entrega de las ''Crónicas Vampíricas'', Anne Rice nos ofrece la historia de Armand, el eterno joven agraciado con la cara de un ángel de Botticelli, que apareció por primera vez en la ya clásica Entrevista con el vampiro. Ahora acompañamos a Armand a traves de los siglos desde el Kiev de su infancia, una ciudad arruinada bajo el poder mongol, pasando por la antigua Constantinopla donde es vendido como esclavo por los tartaros, hasta la Venecia del Renacimiento. Aqui, en un magnifico palacio se vera emocional e intelectualmente seducido por el vampiro Marius, un misterioso pintor. Armand parece encontrar la felicidad en una relacion en la que los momentos de pasion se alternan con los instantes de reflexion. Pero las fuerzas del mal entran en escena y Armand se ve forzado a un eterno vagar que le llevara al Paris del siglo XIX y, de alli, al Nueva Orleans de nuestros dias.

When last the vampire Lestat was seen, he was rising from the dead in present-day New Orleans to walk again among Anne Rice''s unforgettable undead. Now Lestat lives again, but in a twilight world of music and memory. His charismatic friend Louis de Pointe du Lac is tortured by the memory of the child vampire, Claudia, whom he loved and lost. He calls on Merrick, young and gorgeous mixed-race by-blow of the rich New Orleans Mayfair clan. To save Louis'' sanity, Merrick must use her black witchcraft to call up the ghost of Claudia - however dangerous this may be. There are other Mayfair spirits who will not lie still, and her search takes her close to the edge, through blood and terror, ritual and violence.Sweeping from New Orleans to the Brazilian jungle and the island of Haiti, this is vampire literature at its most tantalising, sexy and irresistible.

Con Merrick, Anne Rice funde en un mismo libro sus famosas Crónicas Vampíricas y la serie de Las Brujas de Mayfair.Merrick es una bellísima descendiente de les gens de couleur libres, una casta orientada a las practicas y rituales del vudu, que surgio en Nueva Orleans del turbio mestizaje entre las mujeres africanas y los colonizadores franceses. La joven no sabe aun que ha heredado los extraoridinarios poderes con los que sus antecesoras, las brujas de Mayfair, se hicieron famosas en otra epoca. A ese mundo de oscuros exotismos llega el vampiro David Talbot, procedente del reino de las tinieblas. Es el quien relata la fascinante historia de Merrick,cuya trayectoria vital nos transporta desde la Nueva Orleans del pasado y del presente hasta el corazon de civilizaciones que todavia permanecendesconocidas. Un relato cautivador en el que los poderes magicos y los fenomenos sobrenaturales se dan la mano en un baile de seduccion, muerte y renacimiento.

Hay heridas que pueden quedar abiertas durante siglos. Deseoso de poner fin a ese dolor, asediado por los recuerdos, Marius siente que ha llegado el momento de revelar los secretos más íntimos de su milenaria existencia. El ser solitario para quien la inmortalidad es tanto una bendicion como una maldicion se remonta a sus dias como senador de la Roma imperial, a su vida entre druidas, a su mision como protector de los reyes de los vampiros, Akasha y Enkil. Luego hace un alto para evocar los años en los que conocio el amor en brazos de Pandora y describe su tarea como mentor de Lestat, para detenerse mas tarde a describir la caida de Roma, ciudad que abandonaria para refugiarse en Constantinopla, donde conoceria la insaciable Eudoxia.

Louis, un antiguo hacendado de ascendencia francesa desesperado por la muerte de su hermano, es un vampiro que decide contar su historia. Tanto invoca a la muerte que Lestat, un vampiro que vive desde hace cuatrocientos años, acude a su llamada y le convierte, por medio de un mordisco, en un ser despiadado e inmortal en contra de su propia voluntad.

Asediado por los recuerdos, Marius siente que ha llegado el momento de revelar los secretos de su milenaria existencia. Este ser solitario e inmortal evoca sus experiencias de senador romano, entre druidas y como protector de Akasha y Enkil, reyes de los vampiros. Se detiene en su amor por Pandora y en su tarea como mentor de Lestat. Rememora tambien la caida de Roma, su huida a Constantinopla, patria de la insaciable Eudoxia, y el regreso a la Italia renacentista.

Muy diferente de los vampiros clásicos, aunque también sea inmortal y se alimente de sangre humana, el vampiro Lestat tiene poco que ver con los muertos: al contrario, es un personaje lleno de vida cuya apasionante biografia abarca desde el lascivo Paris del siglo XVIII a la Roma de Augusto y la Bretaña de los druidas; desde el Egipto satanico de la prehistoria al mundo frenetico de las estrellas del rock... Toda la historia, practicamente, mientras busca el secreto de su propia inmortalidad.