What Is the LRA?

I mentioned the Lord Ruthven Award in the previous entry.

For those not-in-the-know, they're dished out by The Lord Ruthven Assembly, which is composed of "scholars and writers who maintain active interest in the presence of vampires in literature, myth, and folklore".

Their Awards go to a "a deserving work in vampire fiction or scholarship," which are "usually announced at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts each March in Ft. Lauderdale, FL."

For a list of previous winners, by category, click here.

Bell, Book and E-Mail

Shortly after I wrote this, I contacted Mr. Bell ("Food for the Dead", Wednesday, 5 May 2010 4:45:07 PM) as to whether his blog was the upcoming book, or if the book's gonna be available hardcopy.

I also asked about the "privately published" 2009 edition of Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires, that he sells through his site. How does it differentiate from the 2001 Carroll & Graf original?

In terms of the sequel, The Vampire's Grasp: America's Restless Vampires, and its intended format, he mentioned ("Re: Food for the Dead‏", Sunday, 9 May 2010 1:16:14 AM) that, "The blog is basically a preview of some of the material I will be including in a hardcopy version of the new book."

And here's what he wrote concerning Food's 2009 edition:

Food for the Dead went our of print when the publisher, Carroll & Graf, was bought by the publisher of Basic Books, who eliminated the C&G imprint, so that everything that C&G had published was out-of-print. People still contacted me requesting copies, so I decided to have it reprinted. The text, photos, pages of the reprint are identical to the C&G trade paper edition. The cover is glossy instead of mat.

If you haven't got a copy of Food yet, then you're missing out! As I said before, it's "a classic of the vampirological genre." It even won the 2002 Lord Ruthven Award for Non-Fiction.

So, as you can imagine, I'm pretty enthused about the sequel. Still not crazy about its title, though.