Post Type Archives: VBC Events

As you can imagine, I have been thinking – dreaming, actually – of sharing my book with you ever since I created the VBC in September 2020. This seemed like the perfect way to celebrate both our “two-year anniversary” and the publication of a book that has consumed me ever since I first fell under […]

As O’Farrell’s publisher writes, The Marriage Portrait “brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de’ Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.” O’Farrell was inspired to write Lucrezia’s story after seeing her stunning portrait by the supremely gifted Medici […]

Hailed by the New Yorker as the “greatest American novel you’ve never heard of,” both Stoner and its prodigiously talented author were mostly “off radar” for the initial period after its publication in 1965. But in recent years, and thanks especially to a timely reissuing of the novel by the New York Review of Books […]

Tender Is the Night from 1934 was Fitzgerald’s fourth and final novel. It chronicles the turbulent life of a once-revered doctor, Dick Diver, and his wife Nicole, who was initially his patient. Set in glamorous locales like the French Riviera, the book can feel like a tragic coda to the heady artistic atmosphere of the 1920s […]

I remember being mesmerized by Cusk’s prose from page one of this novel when I first read it years back. It’s no surprise that one of its reviewers described it as “lethally intelligent,” for indeed the depth of the insights and the hum of original thought permeate each page of Outline, which was published in […]