Post Type Archives: VBC Events

Kitamura is widely acclaimed, and Audition was an instant bestseller and named a “2025 Essential Read” by the New Yorker. It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and recognized as a “book of the year” by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, and many others. As we read in the publisher’s description, the novel is all about “acting” […]

VBC members may recall our earlier event in 2022 on Williams’s Stoner, which was largely overlooked until a timely reissuing of the novel by the New York Review of Books Classics in 2006. In Augustus, Williams achieves the rarest of feats: a rigorously researched historical reconstruction of a distant past, ancient Rome, that feels marvelously “contemporary,” through its vivid […]

As we see from the publisher’s description, The Razor’s Edge is the ultimate “quest” narrative – in this case, the journey as much interior as external: Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham’s most brilliant characters – his fiancee Isabel, whose […]

As you can imagine, I have been looking forward to sharing personal books like The Innocents of Florence with you ever since I created the VBC, all those years ago, in September 2020. Here’s the publisher’s description of my book: The story begins with the abandonment of the newborn Agata Smeralda on February 5, 1445, in […]

As you can tell from the publisher’s description, What We Can Know is a highly ambitious work that blends narrative perspectives and historical eras into a single story that explores the nature of what we can – and cannot – know about the past: 2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors […]