Character provides insight into Victoria’s creation of vampire army in Seattle.

By Terri Schwartz

Oh my Edward. Stephenie Meyer has announced she is publishing a new book called “The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner,” due in bookstores June 5 and available for free at BreeTanner.com from June 7 to July 5. The novella will act as something of a companion piece for the “Twilight Saga: Eclipse” film. But it begs the question: Who exactly is Bree Tanner?

It seems a bit surprising that Meyer would choose to write a novella about a character who shows up for such a short period of time in the novels. Don’t worry about hauling out your copy of “Eclipse” to find the surprisingly few pages Tanner appears on, because we did all the dirty work for you. Here is a cheat sheet telling you everything you need to know about the short-lived Bree Tanner.

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Story of newborn vampire from ‘Eclipse’ is due out on June 5.

By Jocelyn Vena

To the surprise and delight of Twilighters everywhere, Stephenie Meyer announced on Tuesday (March 30) that she will be releasing a new “Twilight”-related book this June. On June 5, “The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella” is expected to hit bookstores.

The 192-page book follows the story of Bree, a newborn vampire who appears briefly in “Eclipse” as a member of the army Victoria raises to fight the Cullens and the werewolves. Bree will be played by 14-year-old Jodelle Ferland in the upcoming “Eclipse” movie, out June 30.

“I’m as surprised as anyone about this novella,” Meyer said in a statement. “When I began working on it in 2005, it was simply an exercise to help me examine the other side of ‘Eclipse,’ which I was editing at the time. I thought it might end up as a short story that I could include on my Web site. Then, when work started on ‘The Twilight Saga: The Official Guide,’ I thought the ‘Guide’ would be a good fit for my Bree story. However, the story grew longer than I anticipated, until it was too long to fit into the ‘Guide.’ ”

According to Little Brown Books for Young Readers, the book will be available at 12:01 a.m. on June 5, and $1 of from the sale of each book sold in the United States will be donated to the American Red Cross International Response Fund helping victims of disasters in both Chile and Haiti.

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Los Angeles (E! Online) – Stephenie Meyer won’t be using MySpace to clear up Twilight rumors any time soon.

by Marc Malkin

The author of the best-selling, four-part vampire love series announced on her official website that she is kicking her social networking page to the curb.

“It was a lot of fun while it lasted, and I really miss the early days when I could hang out with people online,” Meyer wrote. “Many of you are hilarious and insightful, and I wish it was easier for me to talk to everyone the way I used to.”

Meyer warned against being duped by imposters…

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Twilight banned by Mormon bookstore: beginning of religious backlash?

Reports say that Stephenie Meyer’s hit book series Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn have been removed from a religious bookstore (The Deseret)’s shelves because it has been “met with mixed review” by the store’s customers. According to the report, the store is owned by the Mormon church and its primary revenue stems from religious book sales.

While The Host remains on the shelves, says the report, the Twilight series has been taken from this Mormon bookseller’s listing.

As we all know, Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon herself. Says she, “I am . . . a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . . . and that has a huge influence on who I am and my perspective on the world, and therefore what I write (though I have been asked more than once, ‘What’s a nice Mormon girl like you doing writing about vampires?’).”

Yet, up until this point, the Twilight series has received fairly little backlash from mainstream religious organizations. This event, however, might mark just the beginning.

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Stephenie Meyer’sThe Host for the big screen?

With the film success of Twilight (starring Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Taylor Lautner) and the probable continuation of that success with The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn, should Stephenie Meyer’s fifth book (no, unfortunately not Midnight Sun) The Host be brought to the big screen?

The Host, Meyer’s “adult” science fiction-style novel was first brought to us Post-Twilight, so its success in book sales was fairly high. With certain expectations in mind, many fans were put off by The Host. However, at a second glance, even Twilight series fans might be able to draw some similarities between Twilight (or, perhaps more appropriately, Breaking Dawn) and this book.

 In The Host, we meet “Wanderer,” a little “soul” who has been implanted into the bodies of several creatures throughout her existence. Though she has been to the fire planet, been a bear and a dolphin before, Wanderer has never seen anything quite like Earth (by the way - it’s Earth day, so do something nice for it today!). When she comes to being in the form of Melanie Stryder (whose name, might I mention curiously resembles Stephenie Meyer), a fearless warrior for the human condition, Wanderer goes through an evolution. Though Wanderer’s soul might’ve been injected into Melanie’s body, Melanie, however, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Coming to Wanderer’s cognition in the form of rampant memories at first, then by voice, Melanie brings to Wanderer memories, emotions, and sentiments that they would never have otherwisesubscribed to. For instance, Mel is carefully poignant to insert distant memories of her affection for both her little brother Jamie and her lover Jared.

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Twilight, New Moon, Stephenie Meyer and the Inevitable J.K. Rowling Comparison

by Larson Hill

With Twilight soon to be breaking dawn on DVD and the Twilight sequel New Moon about to head into production on March 23, stories are beginning to pop up online in greater frequency hailing author Stephenie Meyer as the next J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. Although you can certainly draw similarities on the surface to the larger aspects of Meyer and Rowling and their works, do we really need to go there? Since the Twilight series has a huge, loyal, and passionate fan base and novels like New Moon and Eclipse appeal to both a young teen and young adult demographic, with Twilight about to become the next popular cinematic franchise, the comparisons were inevitable. You have two female authors, with two success series’ of novels, which, by the end of the Twilight adaptations on film, will look like two similar fan-friendly franchises. It’s a lot like the response that awkward American Idol auditoner William Hung received after he told the Idol judges that he couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance, and he had no professional training at all, to which Simon Cowell replied, “No, you don’t say?” It’s simply too easy and obvious a comparison to make. But there is more to the Meyer and Rowling link than meets the eye.

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How did a suburban mother of three become the next big thing in publishing with her chaste-but-erotic Twilight series? Robert Sullivan meets Stephenie Meyer.

She may prefer to write late at night while her family sleeps, but for the record, there is not a lot about Stephenie Meyer, author of the better-than-best-selling Twilight series, that screams vampire. Yes, she has long dark hair and earthy brown eyes, casually highlighted thisafternoon at her home in Arizona by a black Banana Republic cashmere sweater and jeans, but she lacks the arrogance associated with vampireness. Her vibe is homey; she sits you down on her living-room couch, one leg curled up under her, and starts talking as if you had been in the midst of conversation for years. She’s surrounded by her sons’ toys, games, and compasses (her husband is a Cubmaster), as well as her work—her office is in the front hall. There are family photos and a few paintings of the Washington coast, where Twilight takes place. The Phoenix neighborhood where she lives, a kind of desert suburb, is the opposite of the Washington coast, and lately she and her husband have been taking their three boys (ages six, eight, and eleven) on vacation to the Seattle area once in a while, to see green. “It’s nice to show them that there are places where things are alive,” she says. 

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‘She’s not very good,’ King tells USA Weekend of the best-selling writer.

By Larry Carroll

He is among the most successful novelists of the last several decades; so is she. He is known for writing blood-soaked tales filled with creepy monsters and supernatural beings; she dabbles in the realm of vampires, werewolves and bloodletting. So why is Stephen King hating on Stephenie Meyer?

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Tell us what you think of his comments.

Sellers basked in Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ in 2008

By Bob Minzesheimer and Anthony DeBarros, USA TODAY

Stephenie Meyer sold more books in 2008 than any other author (22 million, according to her publisher) and did what no else — not even J.K. Rowling — has done in the 15 years of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list:

She swept the four top slots in 2008’s best sellers with her Twilight series about a romance between a girl (mortal) and boy (vampire).

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Stephenie Meyer has been name Author of the year by USA Today.

Last year, our book of the year was J.K. Rowling’s wonderfully satisfying final Harry Potter title, Deathly Hallows. This year, we’re giving a big shout-out not to one book, but to one author — Stephenie Meyer, queen of the teen vampires.

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