Post Type Archives: VBC Events

I remember being mesmerized by Cusk’s prose from page one of this novel when I first read it years back. It’s no surprise that one of its reviewers described it as “lethally intelligent,” for indeed the depth of the insights and the hum of original thought permeate each page of Outline, which was published in […]

I’ve been wanting to feature a book by García Márquez for some time. After the publication of his legendary novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, he become one of the most influential and admired writers in the world, attaining a rare mix of commercial success and critical acclaim. His endless list of honors […]

Published in 1984 and set in the Prague Spring of 1968, Kundera’s novel is a work that “wears many hats” (which, as you will discover, is quite literally an important motif in the book!). On the one hand, it is a brilliant philosophical novel that explores the metaphysical tension between “lightness” and “weight” in our […]

I’ve been thinking about this novel for a long time, ever since I first fell under its spell decades ago, not long after it was published in 1997. I sensed then that there was something quintessentially “American” about the dramatic rise and fall of the protagonist, Seymour “the Swede” Levov. Even the title of the […]

Flaubert’s Parrot is one of those works that’s difficult to describe: it’s part homage to the soaring literary brilliance of the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, part meditation on aging and loss, and part reflection on what it means to love someone so much and yet somehow know that person so little. You put all these […]