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Summary
Summary
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"An unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice."--New York Times Book Review
The acclaimed debut collection from the author of Chain Gang All Stars; a piercingly raw 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. "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.
Author Notes
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH has an MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Printer ' s Row, and Breakwater Review, where ZZ Packer awarded him the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Adjei-Brenyah dissects the dehumanizing effects of capitalism and racism in this debut collection of stingingly satirical stories. The arguments that exonerate a white man for brutally murdering five black children with a chainsaw in "The Finkelstein 5" highlight the absurdity of America's broken criminal justice system. "Zimmer Land" imagines a future entertainment park where players enter an augmented reality to hunt terrorists or shoot intruders played by minority actors. The title story is one of several set in a department store where the store's best salesman learns to translate the incomprehensible grunts of vicious, insatiable Black Friday shoppers. He returns in "How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing" to be passed over for a promotion despite his impeccable record. Some stories take a narrower focus, such as "The Lion & the Spider," in which a high school senior has to take a demanding job to keep money flowing into his family's house after his father's disappearance. In "Light Spitter," a school shooting results in both the victim and gunman stuck in a shared purgatory. "Through the Flash" spins a dystopian Groundhog Day in which victims of an unexplained weapon relive a single day and resort to extreme violence to cope. Adjei-Brenyah has put readers on notice: his remarkable range, ingenious premises, and unflagging, momentous voice make this a first-rate collection. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore and Company. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Adjei-Brenyah's dozen stories are disturbingly spectacular, made even more so for what he does with magnifying and exposing the truth. At first read, the collection might register as speculative fiction, but current headlines unmasking racism, injustice, consumerism, and senseless violence prove to be clear inspirations. Adjei-Brenyah grabs immediate attention with The Finkelstein 5, in which a white man uses a chain saw to hack off the heads of five black children outside a South Carolina library. His acquittal sparks revenge attacks, eventually luring the story's protagonist, a teenager who works hard to keep his Blackness in the lowest digits on a 10-point scale, to further tragedy. Hate crimes become actual entertainment in Zimmer Land, in which clients pay for interactive justice engagement in a race-based-murder-theme-park. Friday Black exaggerates Black Friday shopping mania into a casual blood-sport, while shopping becomes a year-round battlefield in the related How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing. A teen meets the twin fetuses his girlfriend aborted in Lark Street, and tortuous death and revival form a relentless cycle in Through the Flash. Ominous and threatening, Adjei-Brenyah's debut is a resonating wake-up call to redefine and reclaim what remains of our humanity.--Terry Hong Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
this year has been exhausting in so many ways, asking us to accept more than it seems we can, more than it seems should be possible. But really, in the end, today's harsh realities are not all that surprising for some of us - for people of color, or for people from marginalized communities - who have long since given up on being shocked or dismayed by the news, by what this or that administration will allow, what this or that police department will excuse, who will be exonerated, what this or that fellow American is willing to let be, either by contribution or complicity. All this is done in the name of white supremacy under the guise of patriotism and conservatism, to keep things as they are, favoring white people over every other citizen, because where's the incentive to give up privilege if you have it? Now more than ever I believe fiction can change minds, build empathy by asking readers to walk in others' shoes, and thereby contribute to real change. In "Friday Black," Nana Kwame AdjeiBrenyah has written a powerful and important and strange and beautiful collection of stories meant to be read right now, at the end of this year, as we inch ever closer to what feels like an inevitable phenomenal catastrophe or some other kind of radical change, for better or for worse. And when you can't believe what's happening in reality, there is no better time to suspend your disbelief and read and trust in a work of fiction - in what it can do. Adjei-Brenyah grew up in a suburb of New York and graduated with his M.F.A. from Syracuse University, where he was taught by the short story master George Saunders. "Friday Black" is an unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice. This is 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. The two stories that bookend the collection are the most gruesome, and maybe my favorites. Where they could be seen as gratuitous (at least to those readers who are not paying close attention to the news, or to those who intentionally avert their eyes), I find them perfectly paced narratives filled with crackling dialogue and a rewarding balance of tension and release. 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. Adjei-Brenyah exaggerates only ever so slightly, or uses a futuristic hypothetical premise to reveal something true about this country's underhanded, undermining underbelly of an unconscious, which acts out its most base insults, impulses and injuries to the detriment of black communities (and many other communities of color). More often than not his characters struggle with not knowing what to do, given these seemingly impossible, extreme circumstances, and not all of them figure it out. But we don't need them to: His many truths, insights and beautifully crafted sentences just sing on the page. "All I do is sweat and feel hurt all around my body and in my head," says one character. "It gets dark. By then, I feel like death / poop"; another articulates, "How I feel about Marlene : She could keel over plus die and I'd be happy plus ecstatic." 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. The first story in the collection, "The Finkelstein 5," is about chain-saw decapitation, innocence destroyed by white privilege via brute force, and the lack of white accountability in our nation's maddening racial bias and failing justice system. The main character, Emmanuel, who throughout the story tempers his "blackness" on a l-to-10 scale, is trying to figure out how to exist in a society that expects you to play by rules it means to rule you with, unjustly. Does there come a time when enough is enough, and violence must face violence with violence? In "The Era," the author reveals a cold, sterile, prophetic world through the eyes of a teenager, Ben, who is not genetically modified, but a "clear-born." The story explores what humanity might look like in the future of scientific advancement, and what is true and authentic vs. syndicated or synthetic. Who is to say who is more valuable: the manmade beings or the "clear-borns"? Most compelling in this story is Ben's increasingly addictive relationship to a socially acceptable, regulated drug called "Good"; we eventually understand how cold and lifeless is the idea of gene manipulation technology if you follow it to its logical conclusion. "I look in the medical kit just in case. No Good. I take the empty injector and bring it to my neck. I hit the trigger and stab and hope maybe I'll get something. I hit the trigger again. Again." If Ben's voice borrows a little from Saunders's narrator in "The Semplica-Girl Diaries," the influence is understandable; I can think of no better short story writer to borrow from. That said, Adjei-Brenyah's voice here is as powerful and original as is Saunders's throughout "Tenth of December." The title of the collection is an inversion of our most bloodthirsty, capitalistic annual ritual - Black Friday - and in the titular story Adjei-Brenyah turns everything inside out to expose our blood and guts and desire and greed and savings. Every bit of hyperbole holds more truth than most of what the news, which only sometimes tries its best to be cool, calm and objective, has to report. Fiction in 2018 has gotten it right in finding truth without relying on fact. "Friday Black" explores capitalism and mall culture in a way I've never read before. It's one of the shorter entries in the collection, butit sets the gruesome scene for two later stories that tackle the same world from distinct points of view. All three mall stories are smart, funny and fun, despite having morbid tendencies. I could read a whole novel of voices from the many storefronts of this generic American Anywhere. The final story, "Through the Flash," is an intense and harrowing Groundhog Day journey through the possibilities of infinite time, and its potential implications for morality and redemption. At one point in the story, in which an infinitely looping reality means each day starts over again with a flash, the main character, Ama - a.k.a. "Knife Queen" - reflects on a particularly horrific period of time: "Every inch of my black skin painted the maroon of life." The word "maroon" here refers to blood, but I had to explore whether there were more meanings to unpack in it as well. Turns out it also means a firework, or a bang used to signal a warning, or, as a verb, to leave someone trapped and isolated in an inaccessible place, abandoned. Black Americans and other Americans of color are already carrying the weight of cruel, unreckoned-with histories on their shoulders; so to live amid unmitigated, too often racially motivated violence with little to no accountability on the horizon feels a lot like abandonment. Adjei-Brenyah, with his own "maroon of life," 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. The dystopian future "Friday Black" 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 is the author of "There There."
Guardian Review
As a child, his family was evicted from their home; now he's winning prizes for his stunning debut Friday Black, a wild, blood-splattered ride through the America of tomorrow Meeting famous writers never makes Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah feel "weird or nerdy", he says. After all, George Saunders was his university tutor and later became a friend. The writer's writer Lynne Tillman was his mentor. Roxane Gay has stamped a cover quote on Friday Black , his debut short story collection, urging the world simply to "read this book". Since its publication last autumn, Adjei-Brenyah has had more than enough opportunities to test his reaction to meeting his literary heroes - moments such as the night in February when he unexpectedly won the book of the year prize at the PEN awards. Zadie Smith was sitting directly behind him as they read his name out. "She looked so regal and epic - her aura is so strong. And Zadie Smith had read my book!" Dazed and giggly, the 28-year-old radiates a self-assured, effervescent energy - albeit one he describes as something of a cover. "I have to be even keel about all [of this], otherwise I will go crazy," he says. "Before this book stuff happened, I'd been on a plane like three times in my life ... Now I'm on a plane pretty much every day and it's wild. It's really absurd to think that people - and this is the cool part - living so far from where I'm from, have read my book and have felt anything about it, you know?" If he weren't so genuinely excited, this might seem excessively self-effacing. "This is weird ... Like I'm supposed to come into this room and think this is normal ?" It is a small meeting room at his London publisher; the walls are lined with dozens of copies of his book. Adjei-Brenyah is jet lagged, which he blames for being "at least 25% less funny". Yet all this should be his new normal. Friday Black is stunning. Adjei-Brenyah sets us in a bleak near future, "a world a little bit worse than ours", he explains, "so maybe, collectively we could imagine a world that was much better". The dozen stories have been written over the course of eight or nine years, mercilessly revised and chosen by him from a bank of about 80. "Let's say 70 of those 80 are trash. No, really, they were never going to be anything more than terrible ... An idea is not enough, you could have a thousand good ideas every day. Usually, I have somebody's voice in my mind for the stories that actually take." Maybe my stories could help someone feel seen. I thought they could push the conversation in a direction that mattered Those stories that did make the final cut have been precisely edited to work together like a concept album; in rhythm and style and beat, Adjei-Brenyah delivers a wildly creative collection that isn't so much dealing with race, capitalism, violence, poverty, abortion and injustice as it is telling it from the inside out with blood and guts. At his most confident, he is driven by the idea that "maybe they could help someone feel seen. I thought they could push the conversation in a direction that mattered." Adjei-Brenyah's work is often called "timely" and Friday Black opens with "The Finkelstein 5", a visceral account of murdered black children, decapitated by an attacker with a chainsaw. And it doesn't let up. He imagines a dystopia in which corpses are swept from the floors of Black Friday sales; where aborted twin foetuses, grey and dry, fight each other and compete for affection. In reference to the killer of teenager Trayvon Martin, he creates Zimmer Land: a theme park for white people to act out brutal fantasies against people of colour. Saunders describes the stories in Friday Black as "strange, crazed, urgent and funny" - and you can imagine film-makers such as Jordan Peele or Kahlil Joseph putting them on screen. "'Timely' has come up a lot," Adjei-Brenyah says, mildly weary. "I think the scary thing is that [these problems have] been there for so long ... there is a certain way of black people being murdered that has become palatable. I want it to be less so." Friday Black is only considered timely, he says, because the subjects that he has dealt with his whole life have finally reached the mainstream. "My book is being absorbed the way it is and amplified the way it is because people want to be thinking about these sorts of issues now. "The fact that people are willing to think about it is good, but the problems that we're trying to deal with might take a long time to sort out. It's terrifying to think what will happen at the next election but I think overall, we're hopefully going to trend towards something better." At the moment, he is preoccupied with the superrich. He doesn't understand the accumulation of wealth in a world that is unjustifiably unequal, where one person can be living on the streets while another has 10 homes. "I'm used to being like: 'Let me transfer $7 from this account to that account so I can have enough to pull out $20 cash.' All of a sudden, you win this prize [the PEN award of $75,000] and I can't even exactly understand... I feel guilty. I'm like, you know, is anyone allowed to have that at one time? So then, how do these billionaires feel? "It's obviously morally wrong. It's inherently not sustainable." He looks quizzical, still unknotting the thread. "The government regulates how much money is in circulation, there is a pot that everyone has to share from, it's not like it's coming from nowhere. So you, as [a rich] individual, can be taking someone else's money, taking from them directly. It's almost like, what if you had an endless buffet and there's people starved next to you and you don't give them food? That is what you're doing every single day." As the son of Ghanaian immigrants to the US - a lawyer father and teacher mother - whose health and finances both suffered in their new country, Adjei-Brenyah is wary of how good America is at conflating "morality with things ... like the acquisition of stuff is a duty? It's weird." His family moved from Queens, New York, when he was seven years old and settled in Spring Valley, a predominantly immigrant community 22 miles north of Manhattan. "All it takes is one person getting sick and your house is foreclosed," he says, recalling what his family went through. "Now you're getting evicted... We had a period where we were comfortable - seeing that change pretty quickly is part of why I am so suspicious." The time he spent working in retail - a job he was only able to give up a few years ago - has also gone some way to shaping his thinking. Now he teaches at Syracuse University where he received his MFA in creative writing. He has just bought his first TV; his first laptop was bought for him by his older sister, well after he had started college and been overwhelmed by "all these kids in every class with their MacBooks. "I had no understanding of what it was to be a writer, but I think the reason I chose it is because I became very cynical about things that can be taken away and things that I couldn't control on my own. And writing - I can do it 100% by myself. I was insanely obsessed." Has the Trump presidency provided a creative impetus for him and his peers? "I wrote this book before I thought it was even possible for someone like Donald Trump to become president," he says flatly. "He's definitely a symptom, but now you can't ignore it. He says and does terrible things. He's an unrepentant misogynist in obvious ways that are trackable and traceable and recorded. He isn't interested in pretending to be a good person by the normal standard ... What is scary, in a way, is that even if he got destroyed [in the 2020 presidential elections], it doesn't mean the problem is gone." It's unlikely that the truths of Adjei-Brenyah's stories will reach the audiences that might need them the most, but he is clear that neither artists "or policymakers [should be] pandering to the worst people, who don't even view black people as humans in the same light as them. "I don't want [this book] to preach just to the choir and actually, I know I'm not. Like, in the literary world, the choir is not even exactly what I think it is because you go in any literary room anywhere and you'll get: 'Oh wow, we care so much. It's racism and this, that and the other'." He smiles apologetically and looks at the busy open-plan office space beyond the glass wall of his publisher's office. "But, like, this room is just as white as anything else." Adjei-Brenyah was in college at SUNY Albany when Trayvon Martin was murdered. It was a pivotal moment for him; he and a friend created pamphlets and stayed up until 3am distributing them across campus. "We were self-righteous ... We fixed racism, you know! We felt we had to galvanise, we woke up expecting to see the new world order we had ushered in." Nothing happened. "We saw the janitor sweeping all the pamphlets away. We had pretty much just littered." He laughs. "I remember not liking it... but it was good for me. Rather than saying: 'This is me and my wisdom and this is how you do it and live your life,' what I learned is to ask questions instead. Which is when it starts sounding corny ... in that I try to ask important questions." He does not want to sound grand. "Because even asking questions creates some kind of truth. You've just got to be willing to look at it hard and say something real."
Kirkus Review
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our "ongoing racial dialogue" a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers' expectations. "The Finkelstein 5," the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, "Zimmer Land," is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or "problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: "The Era," for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called "Good." The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there's more in Adjei-Brenyah's quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in "The Lion the Spider," a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When asked in a New York Times Book Review interview why he writes political stories, Adjei-Brenyah answered, "If the house is on fire, I'm not going to write about what's in the fridge." In his smart, darkly funny debut collection of short stories, society itself seems on fire with racism, mob mentality, rampant consumerism, and the glorification of violence. Adjei-Brenyah sets the unflinching tone for the collection with the first story, "The Finkelstein 5," in which groups of vigilantes dole out their version of justice after a chainsaw-wielding white man is acquitted of murdering five black children outside a public library. In "Zimmer Land," a client can pay for the opportunity to commit a hate crime in a scenario disturbingly close to the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. In "Friday Black" and "How To Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing," consumerism has become blood sport, and casualties are literally swept out of the way so the bargain hunting can continue unabated. The casual, conversational tone used by narrators -Corey Allen and Carra Patterson adds to the horror-the stories feel only slightly hyperbolic, even as they are completely unnerving. -VERDICT Brilliant and tragic, this is essential for all fiction collections. ["Powerful work for a wide range of readers": LJ 8/18 review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]-Beth Farrell, -Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Fela, the headless girl, walked toward Emmanuel. Her neck jagged with red savagery. She was silent, but he could feel her waiting for him to do something, anything. Then his phone rang, and he woke up. He took a deep breath and set the Blackness in his voice down to a 1.5 on a 10-point scale. "Hi there, how are you doing today? Yes, yes, I did recently inquire about the status of my application. Well, all right, okay. Great to hear. I'll be there. Have a spectacular day." Emmanuel rolled out of bed and brushed his teeth. The house was quiet. His parents had already left for work. That morning, like every morning, the first decision he made regarded his Blackness. His skin was a deep, constant brown. In public, when people could actually see him, it was impossible to get his Blackness down to anywhere near a 1.5. If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0. Though Emmanuel was happy about scoring the interview, he also felt guilty about feeling happy about anything. Most people he knew were still mourning the Finkelstein verdict: after twenty-eight minutes of deliberation, a jury of his peers had acquitted George Wilson Dunn of any wrongdoing whatsoever. He had been indicted for allegedly using a chain saw to hack off the heads of five black children outside the Finkelstein Library in Valley Ridge, South Carolina. The court had ruled that because the children were basically loitering and not actually inside the library reading, as one might expect of productive members of society, it was reasonable that Dunn had felt threatened by these five black young people and, thus, he was well within his rights when he protected himself, his library-loaned DVDs, and his children by going into the back of his Ford F-150 and retrieving his Hawtech PRO eighteen-inch 48cc chain saw. The case had seized the country by the ear and heart, and was still, mostly, the only thing anyone was talking about. Finkelstein became the news cycle. On one side of the broadcast world, anchors openly wept for the children, who were saints in their eyes; on the opposite side were personalities like Brent Kogan, the ever gruff and opinionated host of What's the Big Deal? , who had said during an online panel discussion, "Yes, yes, they were kids, but also, fuck niggers." Most news outlets fell somewhere in-between. On verdict day, Emmanuel's family and friends of many different races and backgrounds had gathered together and watched a television tuned to a station that had sympathized with the children, who were popularly known as the Finkelstein Five. Pizza and drinks were served. When the ruling was announced, Emmanuel felt a clicking and grinding in his chest. It burned. His mother, known to be one of the liveliest and happiest women in the neighborhood, threw a plastic cup filled with Coke across the room. When the plastic fell and the soda splattered, the people stared at Emmanuel's mother. Seeing Mrs. Gyan that way meant it was real: they'd lost. Emmanuel's father walked away from the group wiping his eyes, and Emmanuel felt the grinding in his chest settle to a cold nothingness. On the ride home, his father cursed. His mother punched honks out of the steering wheel. Emmanuel breathed in and watched his hands appear, then disappear, then appear, then disappear as they rode past streetlights. He let the nothing he was feeling wash over him in one cold wave after another. But now that he'd been called in for an interview with Stich's, a store self-described as an "innovator with a classic sensibility" that specialized in vintage sweaters, Emmanuel had something to think about besides the bodies of those kids, severed at the neck, growing damp in thick, pulsing, shooting blood. Instead, he thought about what to wear. In a vague move of solidarity, Emmanuel climbed into the loose-fitting cargoes he'd worn on a camping trip. Then he stepped into his patent-leather Space Jams with the laces still clean and taut as they weaved up all across the black tongue. Next, he pulled out a long-ago abandoned black hoodie and dove into its tunnel. As a final act of solidarity, Emmanuel put on a gray snapback cap, a hat similar to the ones two of the Finkelstein Five had been wearing the day they were murdered--a fact George Wilson Dunn's defense had stressed throughout the proceedings. Emmanuel stepped outside into the world, his Blackness at a solid 7.6. He felt like Evel Knievel at the top of a ramp. Excerpted from Friday Black: Stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.