Post Type Archives: VBC Events

With Playground, Powers has cemented his reputation as one of America’s leading novelists. Like Rachel Kushner, author of our November 2024 VBC selection Creation Lake, Powers enjoys both commercial and critical success, most recently for his brilliant novel The Overstory. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019, The Overstory is a moving account of how the lives of nine Americans are […]

Ever since she burst on the literary scene with The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, Kushner has been heralded as a major new voice in American fiction and as an author known for her edgy depictions of characters living “on the brink.” A word that often comes up in discussions of her work […]

When I started the Virtual Book Club in October 2020 – which makes this our four-year VBC anniversary! – Housekeeping was the kind of book I had in mind. There’s something classic and timeless about it, especially its gorgeous, unhurried prose, but also contemporary, as it lays bare some of the major elements of life today. I remember reading the […]

It’s hard not to think of the time that The Moon and Sixpence was published, 1919, as part of a “golden age” of the English and European novel. During this incredibly tense era of world war and the interwar period, literary movements like Modernism flourished. Maugham’s contemporaries included such legendary authors as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott […]

It would be difficult to choose two more distinguished authors in recent literature than Gabriel García Márquez and J. M. Coetzee. For one thing, each has won the ultimate literary award, the Nobel Prize in Literature: García Márquez in 1982, and Coetzee in 2003. Each author has also hit that “sweet spot” of success: their books sell well, […]