Known for decades as the best-selling author of erotically charged vampire novels, Anne Rice spent nearly 40 years as a “card carrying atheist” before returning to the Catholic Church in 1998. Having sold more than 100 million books worldwide, Rice ultimately decided to leave “the

What to read this Lent

Christmas reading recommendations from our literary editor.

Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta (Doubleday, $22.95) is a disturbing book, one that has become a lightning rod for commentators of every stripe, from believers to unbelievers. Can it also be read as a consoling book? I believe so, though the consolation is not “c

I met the writer Donald McCaig a decade ago on a sheep farm he had created for himself near Williamsville, Va., (pop. 16) in rural Highland County. He had left the tense and competitive ad game in New York more than 25 years earlier. My wife, Judy, and I went for a weeklong stay.   Though not p

The contemporary poet Franz Wright expresses a sense of human life as a brief hiatus between an immense before and after. The cold and dark was Wright’s environment for decades of his life, starting from age eight, when divorce took his much-admired father, the poet James Wright, out of the ho