Post Type Archives: VBC Events

A New Zealander, Eleanor Catton burst onto the international scene with her second novel, The Luminaries, which won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton the youngest author to win the prize at 28. In addition to her literary work, she is also a prolific screenwriter whose work includes the acclaimed 2020 film version of Emma, an adaptation of Jane […]

Consistently named one of the “greatest books of all time,” Camus’ The Stranger is also considered by many to be the ultimate Existentialist classic. One of a number extraordinary philosophical works written in Europe during a time of world war, The Stranger depicts the social ills and absurdities of modern life amid the quest for meaning in a world whose traditional […]

Roman Stories is a collection of short stories that covers a range of topics, all held together by their common setting in Rome, the city that has become Lahiri’s adopted home over the years as she maintains a bilingual career as an author in English and Italian (while also working as a translator of Italian). In […]

E. M. Forster was described by D. H. Lawrence as the “last Englishman,” and it’s indeed difficult to imagine a writer who better embodies the dramatic cultural transitions from England out of the nineteenth-century and Edwardian Era into the time of world wars and modern social upheaval (Forster died in 1970 at the age of […]

Many of you may already be familiar with the writing of Zadie Smith, who burst on the scene as a 25-year-old literary phenom in 2000 with the remarkable novel White Teeth. A sparkling inquiry into the social tensions of modern multicultural London, White Teeth is often hailed as a key work in recent postcolonial literature. Smith has followed that […]