Kathryn Chittick examines the early career of Charles Dickens in light of the movements in literary criticism and the rise of the novel and Victorian literary canon.

A classic novel based on Dickens' personal experiences, it delineates the sufferings and sentiments of orphans and abandoned children through the outstandingly portrayed character of David. The novel shows Dickens incredible knack of uniting humor with pathos. The story ponders on the themes of self-exploitation, hypocrisy, sexual degradation, and fraud. Wondrously realistic masterpiece!

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This bibliography, first published in 1989, brings together a number of reviews of the early Dickens which appeared in contemporary magazines, newspapers, and quarterlies during the eight years between 1833 and 1841. The chronological arrangement of reviews, both of Dickens and others, forms the core of this study. This book is perfect for those studying Dickens and his works in-depth.

Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * Winner of the Whiting Award * Longlisted for the National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize * Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize * Finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Refinery29, NPR, The Root, HuffPost, Vanity Fair, Bustle, Chicago Tribune, PopSugar, and The Undefeated In one of the season’s most acclaimed works of fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires offers “a firecracker of a book...a triumph of storytelling: intelligent, acerbic, and ingenious” (Financial Times). Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with race, identity politics, and the contemporary middle class in this “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo) collection. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous—two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids’ backpacks—while others are devastatingly poignant. In the title story, when a cosplayer, dressed as his favorite anime character, is mistaken for a violent threat the consequences are dire; in another story, a teen struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with so-called black culture. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires “has taken the best of what Toni Cade Bambara, Morgan Parker, and Junot Díaz do plus a whole lot of something we’ve never seen in American literature, blended it all together...giving us one of the finest short-story collections” (Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division).