Dickens in Brooklyn: Essays on Family, Writing, and Madness

Dickens in Brooklyn is a virtuoso collection of unusual, compelling essays in which critically acclaimed and award-winning author Jay Neugeboren explores experiences that have been central to his life: caring long-term for a brother with mental illness; finding and connecting with long-lost family members; a posthumous lunch with Oliver Sacks; his years as single parent to his three children; his decision as a General Motors executive trainee to violate company policy and hang out with "hourlies;" a thwarted kiss at a teenage summer camp where he was a young Jewish man in exile among Jews.

Neugeboren is the author most recently of Whatever Happened to Frankie King and twenty-three other prize-winning works of fiction and nonfiction. His essays have been recently published in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The American Scholar, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tablet, and Commonweal, and are here collected for the first time.