Post Type Archives: VBC Events

I think of Turgenev’s novel as the epitome of the great 19th-century novel, those feats of narrative and dazzling characterization that transport the reader to a remote time that somehow feels familiar and intimate. A moving account of family life, Fathers and Sons tells the story of the young university graduate Arkady’s return home, accompanied by a […]

Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, Demon Copperhead is a modern-day recasting of Charles Dickens‘s legendary 19th-century novel David Copperfield, which I will be teaching in October 2023 in The Charles Dickens Seminar: DAVID COPPERFIELD (see details below). Kingsolver’s dialogue with Dickens is evident from the first page of her book, which essentially “rhymes” with the opening of Dickens’s great novel: First, […]

Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, The Color Purple is as much a cultural phenomenon as a literary event. It was adapted into an acclaimed film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg in 1985, and it was also the basis for a musical. The Color Purple is the searing account, narrated in epistolary form, of Celie, a poor young Black girl […]

The plot of The Eight Mountains revolves around the unlikely friendship between Pietro, a city boy from Milan, and Bruno, an adventurous child he meets in the Italian Alps. As the publisher’s description notes, over the years and after a series of consequential events “the two boys come to find the true meaning of friendship and camaraderie, even as their […]

In the two centuries since its publication in 1816, Jane Austen’s Emma has won over readers worldwide because of its charm, insights, and what the Italians call sprezzatura: an untranslatable word that means having an effortless-seeming light touch, while masking serious thought and depth below the surface. Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, “I am going to […]