Vinson Cunningham: Great Expectations - Paperback Release

Join us for a paperback release event with Vinson Cunningham, discussing his national bestseller Great Expectations. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by January 21 to request.

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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 writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Vinson Cunningham.

“One of the smartest and most involving political novels I’ve read in ages.”—The Wall Street Journal

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

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 hopes and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States's 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.

Photo credit: Arielle Gray

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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