“here in my hands is a book about disappointment”: Reading about Reading in Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent
Join us for our annual literature lecture and discussion, featuring one of the most popular books of the past year: The Correspondent.
In a letter addressed to Mr. Larry McMurtry on December 10, 2018, Sybil Van Antwerp, the tortured heroine of Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent (2025), describes her experiences reading McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. She writes to him, “I was sitting there thinking here in my hands is a book about disappointment” (254). Sybil’s description of reading McMurtry’s novel reflects the readers’ own experience of reading The Correspondent. During our discussion, we will consider the ways this brilliant epistolary novel illustrates not only Sybil’s disappointments but also her reading preferences—and discover our own reading preferences in the process.
Aimee Pozorski has authored Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (2011), Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature (2014), and AIDS-Trauma and Politics (2019). The fourth book in her trauma tetralogy, Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification: Housing Trauma in the American City is forthcoming in 2026. She has edited or co-edited volumes on the topics of Philip Roth, American Modernism, and HIV/AIDS representation. With Maren Scheurer, she co-edited the peer-reviewed journal, Philip Roth
Studies from 2019-2024 and the Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth (2024). She is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, where she also directs the certificate in Racial Justice.
Please register, so we can set the community room up with appropriate seating.
Bring your book club!
Sponsored by the Friends of the Avon Library.