Praise for Friday Black INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a Best Book by: Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Huffington Post , BuzzFeed , Harper''s Bazaar, Nylon , Boston Globe, Southern Living , O, the Oprah Magazine, Chicago Tribune , The Verge, Vulture , Philadelphia Inquirer , The Millions , New York Observer , Literary Hub , Color Lines, PopSugar, The Rumpus, BookPage , St. Louis Post-Dispatch ,the CBC, My Domaine , Bookish , Read It Forward, The Seattle Review of Books , and Publishers Weekly One of the National Book Foundation''s "5 Under 35" honorees, chosen by Colson Whitehead An Indie Next Pick Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction "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--like all great dystopian fiction--is bleakly futuristic only on its surface. At its center, each story--sharp as a knife--points to right now." -- Tommy Orange, New York Times Book Review "Strange, dark and sometimes unnervingly funny . The [titular] story is a not-so-subtle critique of consumerism run amok. But like all effective satire, there''s a glint of truth and accumulation of mundane details that make the farcical scenario feel plausible .
[ Friday Black ] uses fantasy and scorching satire to tackle issues like school shootings, abortion, racism, the callowness of commercialism, and how cyclical violence can be passed on across generations . Adjei-Brenyah renders prosaic scenarios unfamiliar by adding a surreal, disorienting twist." -- Alexandra Alter, The New York Times "This pitch-dark, brutal, occasionally--mercifully!--funny collection of stories takes on the insidious nature of racism and the horrors of capitalism in equal measure and somehow ends up hopeful on the other side. Friday Black is enraging, it''s inventive . Much like living through this year, the experience of reading Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah''s debut can be harrowing, but it''s ultimately a pleasure to be in the company of a new voice as exciting as this." -- Vogue "Fearless.[A] major literary debut . Unnervingly unpredictable .
Friday Black ought to land as publishing''s definitive addition to an exciting pop culture trend: new black surrealism. Films such as Get Out and Sorry to Bother You , or Donald Glover projects like Atlanta and "This Is America," derive political power from a kind of absurdist framing, which this book shares . Adjei-Brenyah executes his premises with an elegant Black Mirror -like realism.In their gnarly intensity, their polemical potency, they hit us where we live, here and now. Sometimes it takes a wild mind to speak the plainest truth." -- Entertainment Weekly "One of the most anticipated literary debuts of the fall, Friday Black veers between the surreal and the satirical in its bold take on being young and black in America." -- Entertainment Weekly , Most Anticipated Books of October "[A] knockout . illuminate[s] unsettling truths about the world.
" -- Elle "Like Kurt Vonnegut, the debut author introduces readers to worlds adjacent to our reality. They''re familiar enough for us to recognize ourselves within them--until Adjei-Brenyah takes the tough-to-stomach parts of humanity to extremes, like Black Friday shoppers turning into violent, materialistic murderers. The stories wrestle with racism, mob mentality, police violence, and unrestrained consumerism. They''re quick to read, and incredibly hard to forget." -- Elle , "Best Books of the Year So Far" "Reading Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah''s debut short story collection Friday Black is like being shaken awake. These stories exist in a sort of hyperreality, ordinary characters living in the not-so-unbelievable, Black Mirror -esque future of a culture that doesn''t hesitate to commodify cruelty or monetize revolution . Adjei-Brenyah skewers the ways we brush past racism and injustice, making the absurdity of the rhetoric around both impossible to ignore." -- BuzzFeed "Yes, anyone who likes Saunders should read Friday Black right away.
Anyone who could take or leave Saunders should, too.No comparison can convey a book''s intellectual heft, and Friday Black is as intellectually hefty as fiction can get. In these twelve stories, Adjei-Brenyah turns over ideas about racism, about classism and capitalism, about the apocalypse, and, most of all, about the corrosive power of belief. His work is fiercely, spikily funny. And no matter how supernatural his stories get, no matter how zombie-ish or futuristic, every one of them takes place in the world we know.Adjei-Brenyah has some serious powers himself. The energy in his fiction is wild, barely controllable yet perfectly controlled. Short stories, as a form, tend to compress big emotion into small action, but not these.
Adjei-Brenyah fits big emotion, big action, and big thought into each story. His violence is never gratuitous, his ghosts never too chain-rattling to believe.Adjei-Brenyah speaks in more voices than seems possible, and those voices will follow you off the page.They will assert themselves, over and over. I''m here, these stories say. Sit up. Pay attention. I''m here.
" -- NPR Books "This collection is nothing short of astounding." -- Nick Petrulakis, Boston Globe "Adjei-Brenyah''s collection promises a searing, exacting look at injustice in America, from the quotidian to the systemic, delivered in a way that makes it impossible to look away." -- Huffington Post "Imagine a cross between Get Out and Ralph Ellison''s Invisible Man , and you''ll have a sense of what awaits readers of this audacious debut: darkly absurdist tales that take the horrors of racism to surreal new levels." -- O, the Oprah Magazine "The edge of the stories in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah''s debut collection Friday Black is razor sharp, ready to cut deep. This book is dark and captivating and essential. This book is 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. Marvel at the intelligence of each of these stories and what they reveal about racism, capitalism, complacency and their insidious reach." -- Roxane Gay "For literature to bring forth such an astonishing new voice as Nana K. Adjei-Brenyah''s--tender and furious, wise and wise-assed--marks a major leap forward for us all. The very first story brought me to tears, putting me in mind of Babel or Chekhov. And Adjei-Brenyah keeps doing that--dragging you through dystopic muck and mire before landing you in a transcendent spiritual place. This is the fiction debut of the year, and I can''t cheer it loudly enough. Bravo, young man.
We await your encore." -- Mary Karr "These stories are an excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny, yet classical in the way they take on stubborn human problems: the depravities of capitalism, love struggling to assert itself within heartless systems. 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." -- George Saunders "Stunning . Adjei-Brenyah grapples with many of the most complicated, essential issues of today, from the evils of racism and capitalism to the ways in which violence and inequality are expected parts of life for so many people in America. Adjei-Brenyah''s prose grabs you from the beginning and doesn''t loosen its grip, as it takes you into the dark corners of the American experience, with a lyricism, dark wit, and palpable emotional weight." -- Nylon "Searing . Adjei-Brenyah examines, with dark humor and urgent insight, what it''s like to be young and black in America .
These satirical tales tackle violence, injustice and r.