Post Type Archives: VBC Events

It is difficult to encapsulate in few words just how towering a figure in literary history James Joyce was and remains. He changed forever the way we think about the “novel” with his monumental Ulysses from 1922, and in other works like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners he combined […]

Joyce Carol Oates. The name is one of the most iconic in all of contemporary American literature, an author who has built up a staggering body of work that chronicles the American experience in all its complexity, depth, and texture. Oates is best known for bestselling novels like We Were the Mulvaneys, a haunting account […]

I have been teaching Frankenstein for decades now, and it never ceases to amaze me: what starts as an extravagant “gothic” tale morphs into a breathtaking meditation on the nature of artistic – and human – creation, the psychology of guilt, and the ethics of pursuing knowledge at all costs. Shelley’s novel also provides a […]

This has long been one of my all-time favorite books: I fell under the spell of its gorgeous lyricism decades ago when I first read it, and the enchantment has only deepened since. I even went so far as to visit the beautiful city where the novel takes place, the gem of Renaissance architecture Ferrara, […]

The name Isabel Allende is probably familiar to many of you – she has written one culturally significant novel after the other (21 and counting) and has sold over 60 million books in her illustrious career. This recent work, A Long Petal of the Sea, is a sweeping historical novel that starts in the Spanish […]