Post Type Archives: VBC Events

Joyce Carol Oates. The name is one of the most iconic in all of contemporary American literature, an author who has built up a staggering body of work that chronicles the American experience in all its complexity, depth, and texture. Oates is best known for bestselling novels like We Were the Mulvaneys, a haunting account […]

I have been teaching Frankenstein for decades now, and it never ceases to amaze me: what starts as an extravagant “gothic” tale morphs into a breathtaking meditation on the nature of artistic – and human – creation, the psychology of guilt, and the ethics of pursuing knowledge at all costs. Shelley’s novel also provides a […]

This has long been one of my all-time favorite books: I fell under the spell of its gorgeous lyricism decades ago when I first read it, and the enchantment has only deepened since. I even went so far as to visit the beautiful city where the novel takes place, the gem of Renaissance architecture Ferrara, […]

The name Isabel Allende is probably familiar to many of you – she has written one culturally significant novel after the other (21 and counting) and has sold over 60 million books in her illustrious career. This recent work, A Long Petal of the Sea, is a sweeping historical novel that starts in the Spanish […]

Could there be a more perfect summer book? The novel all takes place in one June day in 1923, and it is an astonishing meditation on the little universes of thought, hope, desire, fear, and wonder that each of us carries inside. As you trace this “day in the life” of the protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, […]