It is the first book to examine the explosion of vampire narratives -- in fiction, film, comics and on television -- since Anne Rice wrote her ground-breaking Interview With the Vampire in 1976. Hollinger and co-editor Joan Gordon, an English professor at Nassau Community College in New York, have compiled essays by scholars and vampire-genre novelists from the United States, Canada, England and Japan on a 19th-century archetype whose revival and transformation in the late 20th century reflects new anxieties about contamination and sexual perversion, about blood, sex and death, says Hollinger.

        Essays explore, for instance, the image of the starving "moral" vampire in Rice's Interview and the dieting obsessions of anorexia nervosa and bulemia; the fear of AIDS; the youth sub-culture called Goth which embraces the liberating sexuality of vampires; homosexuality and vampires. A Japanese scholar discusses the vampire image as an alien sub-culture figure in Japan. Hollinger's contribution is Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire and Gordon's essay is Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth: The Vampire in Search of its Mother.

        The two compiled the invited essays over about three years. The University of Pennsylvania Press has just released the 264-page book in hard- and soft-cover versions. The hard-cover run sold out immediately through advance orders, says Hollinger.

        With the publication of this book, Hollinger returns to her first love, science fiction. She is working with three others on a history of science fiction criticism and theory from 1700 to now.

Ballet book wins American citation
English literature professor James Neufeld's history of Canadian ballet has received a special citation from the American-based Dance Perspectives Foundation.

        Power to Rise: The Story of the National Ballet of Canada was one of four books about dance published in 1996 to win a special citation at the foundation's annual awarding of the De La Torre Bueno Prize. The presentation took place at Tinker Auditorium, the French Institute/Alliance Francaise, in New York. As part of the ceremony, Neufeld screened a CBC video of archival footage of the Canada's National Ballet going back to 1954.

         Julie Kavanagh's biography of Sir Frederick Ashton won the De La Torre Bueno Prize for the most distinguished book-length manuscript containing original research in the field of dance. This year, because of the overall quality of submissions, the jury awarded four special citations in addition to the prize itself.