The stories in Friday Black are volatile, unpredictable concoctions. While reading them, I imagined author Nana Kwame Adeji-Brenyah as a mad scientist, mixing beakers with wild abandon: some societal critique here, a little gallows humor there, a dose of dystopian sci-fi just for kicks. The resulting stories feel just as likely to combust as they do to end. Adjei-Brenyah is among the most exciting new voices in fiction I've encountered all year, the heir apparent to Vonnegut and Saunders's tradition of dark, socially incisive postmodernism.
— From Theo
Once you start in on "the Finkelstein 5", you will not be able to put this down. This story will grab you, enrage you, and break you while you chant along in a radical cry for justice. Adjei-Brenyah's voice rings powerful and true throughout this collection of stories. Satirical, heartbreaking, and violent stories set just within reach of "dystopian", but oh so relevant today.
— From Laura
I was riding a subway when I started this collection. The first story was so incredible I completely missed my stop and didn't even care. Brillant speculative fiction truly doesn't get any better than this. With themes such as systemic racism, it will hurt to process the words of this mirror turned on society, but you will never stop thinking about the important messages between these pages.
— From BrandonNANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH is the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black. Originally from Spring Valley, New York, he graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Literary Hub, the Paris Review, Guernica, and Longreads. He was selected by Colson Whitehead as one of the National Book Foundation's “5 Under 35” honorees, is the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.
Praise for Friday Black INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a Best Book by: New York Times, TIME, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Huffington Post, Guardian, BuzzFeed, Newsweek,Harper’s Bazaar, Nylon, Boston Globe, Southern Living, O, the Oprah Magazine,Chicago Tribune, The Verge, The Root,Vulture, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Millions, New York Observer, Literary Hub, Color Lines,PopSugar, PEN America, The Rumpus, BookPage,St. Louis Post-Dispatch,the CBC, Longreads,Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Library Journal, The Big Issue, Chicago Public Library, My Domaine, Locus Magazine,Bookish, Read It Forward,Entropy Magazine, WAMC, Hudson Booksellers, and The Seattle Review of Books One of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honorees, chosen by Colson Whitehead Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in Fiction Winner of the Rockland Arts Council's Literary Artist Award One of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2018 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book Finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize Finalist for the American Booksellers Association's Indie Choice Book Awards Finalist for the New England Book Awards Finalist for the John Gardner Award for Fiction Finalist for the Balcones Fiction Prize An Indie Next Pick Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction Longlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award A National Indie Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller A Boston Globe Bestseller A New York Times Editors' Choice A 2019 Notable Book from the American Library Association “A powerful and important and strange and beautiful collection of stories . . . An unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice . . . A dystopian story collection as full of violence as it is of heart. To achieve such an honest pairing of gore with tenderness is no small feat . . . Violence is only gratuitous when it serves no purpose, and throughout Friday Black we are aware that the violence is crucially related to both what is happening in America now, and what happened in its bloody and brutal history . . . In smart, terse prose, Adjei-Brenyah is unflinching, and willing, in most of these 12 stories, to leave us without any apparent hope. But the hope is there—or if it isn’t hope, it’s maybe something better: levelheaded, compassionate protagonists, with just enough integrity and ambivalence that they never feel sentimental. Each of these individuals carries a subtle clarity about what matters most when nothing makes sense in these strange and brutal worlds he builds . . . Adjei-Brenyah’s voice here is as powerful and original as Saunders’s is throughout Tenth of December . . . [Adjei-Brenyah] is here to signal a warning, or perhaps just to say this is what it feels like, in stories that move and breathe and explode on the page. In Friday Black, the dystopian future Adjei-Brenyah depicts&mdash —
