INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “An unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice.” –Tommy Orange, New York Times Book Review “An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny.” –George Saunders “Dark and captivating and essential . . . A call to arms and a condemnation . . . Read this book.” –Roxane Gay A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” … condemnation . . . Read this book.” —Roxane Gay
A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, chosen by Colson Whitehead
Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book
A piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal, and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it’s like to be young and black in America.
From the start of this extraordinary debut, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s writing will grab you, haunt you, enrage and invigorate you. By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day in this country.
These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In “The Finkelstein Five,” Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unforgettable reckoning of the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In “Zimmer Land,” we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And “Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King” show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.
Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.
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This book is dark and captivating and essential… A call to arms and a condemnation. Adjei-Brenyah offers powerful prose as parable. The writing in this outstanding collection will make you hurt and demand your hope. Read this book.
An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny…The wildly talented Adjei-Brenyah has made these edgy tales immensely charming, via his resolute, heartful, immensely likeable narrators, capable of seeing the world as blessed and cursed at once.
This collection is stunning, often hilarious, horrifying at times. Every story caught me off guard and then had me transfixed by the end of it. Adjei-Brenyah is not here to make you feel good about about yourself, he’s here to make you see how you might be complicit in the status quo. Highly recommend this for fans of George Saunders.
Riveting. Every word. An impassioned interrogation of the human condition on the blackhand side, a true work of wonder, just reeking of significance. Here be Nana Kwame, scaling all manner of emotional registers while maintaining a stunning textual authority. And just when you think you’ve settled in, here comes Anansi and the Twelve-Tongued God working other dimensions in a seamless blend. He makes it look effortless but the clarity of the craft is self-evident, a numinous voice powering stories and characters that will inhabit your consciousness long after you’ve finished it and tried to put it down. In this impressive debut of a literary voice both new and edgy, we find an ancient griot telling stories of startling grace, gathering folk around the sacred fire and word by word forging the visions without which the people would perish. Testimony.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has written an exciting, dazzling collection of stories. He writes with a ferocious wit and a big heart. His inventive fictional worlds speak both directly and covertly to this political moment in unexpected and fresh ways. Friday Black marks the thrilling debut of an important new voice in fiction.
Like taking a direct hit from a fellow shopper on Black Friday, this book will knock the wind out of you. Adjei-Brenyah’s utterly fresh debut feels like a marriage between the chilling “battle royale” scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the boundary-leaping fiction of George Saunders, who was one of Adjei-Brenyah’s teachers.
“That morning, like every morning,” Adjei-Brenyah writes in “The Finkelstein 5,” “the first decision he made regarded his Blackness.” For a job interview, Emmanuel tries to get “his blackness as low as 4.0” by donning a tie and smiling. But when a white man is acquitted of the horrifying killing of five black kids, Emmanuel lets his Blackness soar to a “solid 7.6” in a hoodie and low ballcap before joining a group of vigilantes.
In “The Era,” Adjei-Brenyah imagines a future in which children are genetically modified for intelligence and beauty — with unintended results. In “Lark Street,” a young man must face the consequences of his girlfriend’s abortion, literally: the tiny fetuses spring to life and confront him. At an amusement park in “Zimmer Land,” patrons enact realistic shootings of hired actors — and the narrator grows unsettled by repeat customers.
In several piercing stories, Adjei-Brenyah examines the cold, cruel world of retail. In the title story “ravenous humans howl” at the Prominent Mall as a store throws open its doors on Black Friday and a salesman of pricey PoleFace jackets learns to speak the zombie shoppers’ grunted language.
Adjei-Brenyah writes with mind-blowing imagination and a heart on fire, like he has X-ray vision to penetrate the American soul. (Mariner, $14.99)
-Dallas Morning News, November 23, 2018
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a natural writer of pure talent, a magus of the imagination who can, in a few words, transform the mundane into moments of deep insight and powerful significance. I continually found myself carried away by his insights into human behavior and ability to transmute that into splendid works of short fiction.
Friday Black offers us a glimpse of a world held together by both hope and rage. At once strange and hypnotic, uncompromising and merciful, these stories spring from a generous and vivid imagination, singular and expansive. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah offers us a vision of America as we know it, in prose that leads us towards the spectacular and humbles us in its fullness. Follow every advice that tells you to read this book.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a name you better get used to saying. The funny, uncompromising voice heard here for the first time, one that’s not afraid to wander past the checkpoints of realism in order to get at the nature of the American real, will be with us for a long time to come. ‘The Finkelstein Five’ already reads like a classic, even though it stings like it was written this morning.
A striking collection, by turns witty, insightful and brutally honest. Adjei-Brenyah’s inventive language conjures worlds with brevity, specificity and a dark, absurdist humor. An exciting voice.