Dickens in Brooklyn: Essays on Family, Writing, & Madness 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;” and a thwarted kiss at a teenage summer camp where he was a young Jewish man in exile among Jews.

Neugeboren captivates the reader with stories of his brief career in the Merchant Marines and how this led to the break-up of his first serious romance; the ways Judaism did and did not inform his life; about his political activism in the civil rights and anti-war movements and how they derived from and affected his family life; about the “Dickensian” battles that marked the lives of his immediate and extended families; and about his friendships with writers such as Oliver Sacks and Martha Foley, and how these friendships affected his life and career. In all these essays, in exquisite and dramatic detail, he draws on his experience in ways that will enable readers to summon up and reflect on their own lives.

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.