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A Novel
by Vinson Cunningham
A historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young Black man's life in this "coming of age story that captures the soul of America" (The Washington Post), the debut novel from The New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Vinson Cunningham.
I'd seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.
When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator's idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he'll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States' first Black president.
Great Expectations is about David's eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood—that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.
Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, Great Expectations is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, marking the arrival of a major new writer.
"Cunningham's remarkable first novel matches the scale of its namesake." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Alive in its intellectual detours, with Cunningham considering religion, race, sex, film, politics, fatherhood, and more ... A top-shelf intellectual bildungsroman." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The aptly titled Great Expectations announces Vinson Cunningham as a novelist of singular style, wit, and ambition. Read Great Expectations and see our recent past, our present, and even our future anew." —Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, finalist for the National Book Award
"Vinson Cunningham's Great Expectations is epic, intimate, and brimming with brilliance. [It's] is a phenomenal, transfixing work, and Cunningham is a singular, dazzling writer." —Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal and Memorial
This information about Great Expectations was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and critic at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. He co-hosts the podcast "Critics at Large" and his writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Fader, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney's. A former staffer on Barack Obama's first presidential campaign and in his White House, Cunningham has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Art, and Columbia University's School of the Arts. He lives in New York City.
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