In public, when people could actually see him, it was impossible to get his Blackness down to anywhere near a 1.5.

That morning, like every morning, the first decision he made regarded his Blackness. Have a spectacular day.’ Emmanuel rolled out of bed and brushed his teeth. ‘Hi there, how are you doing today? Yes, yes, I did recently inquire about the status of my application. He took a deep breath and set the Blackness in his voice down to a 1.5 on a 10-point scale. She was silent, but he could feel her waiting for him to do something, anything. Marvel at the intelligence of each of these stories and what they reveal about racism, capitalism, complacency and their insidious reach.’įela, the headless girl, walked toward Emmanuel. The writing in this outstanding collection will make you hurt and demand your hope. Adjei-Brenyah offers powerful prose as parable. This books is a call to arms and it is a condemnation. This book is dark, captivating and essential. ‘The edge of the stories in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut collection Friday Black is razor sharp, ready to cut deep. 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.’ ‘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. 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.įresh, exciting, vital and contemporary, Friday Black will appeal to people who love Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, the TV show Black Mirror, the work of Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders, and anyone looking for stories that speak to the world we live in now. In ‘Zimmer Land’ we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. In the first, unforgettable story of this collection, The Finkelstein Five, Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unstinting reckoning of the brutal prejudice of the US justice system. Friday Black is a piercingly raw debut story collection from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, 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.įriday Black tackles urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explores the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world.

Nana kwame adjei brenyah friday black