Post Type Archives: VBC Events

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 […]

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 […]