Vendor
	DeFiore and Company Linda Kaplan
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction: general & literary Short stories

FRIDAY BLACK

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Title story “Friday Black” just optioned by Universal Pictures for feature film, with the author to adapt the script and Executive Produce

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. 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.

Available products
Book Published 2018-10-01 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Comments

“A powerful and important and strange and beautiful collection of stories . . . An unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice . . .” —Tommy Orange, New York Times Book Review

A National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honorees, chosen by Colson Whitehead

“Strange, dark and sometimes unnervingly funny . . . [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

"Surreal, sobering, and tender all at once, this debut collection shines a laser-sharp light on the experience of being black in today's America."

Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize

" 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.” —NPR Books

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book

Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

“For literature to bring forth such an astonishing new voice as Adjei-Brenyah’s—tender and furious, wise and wise-assed— marks a major leap forward for us all… Adjei-Brenyah… drag[s] 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.”

"Inventive and stirring...Ingenious...[His stories] are so daring and mind-bending that you haven’t a clue where he’s going to take you...Adjei-Brenyah is a versatile writer who creates a micro-universe with each story that explodes our expectations and takes us inside frustrated lives." —Bernardine Evaristo, Guardian

"Adjei-Brenyah’s surreal, dystopian Friday Black is 2018's avant-garde darling." —Entertainment Weekly, "The Oscars of the Book World"

Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize

“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.”

Named a Best Book by: New York Times, TIME, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Guardian, BuzzFeed, Newsweek, Harper’s Bazaar, PEN America, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, The Big Issue and more

"Straight up breathtaking. I always love to read a book and think 'I have no goddamn idea how this person is this good.' It's so good."

"Standout." —Guardian, Best Fiction of the Year

“Fearless...[A] major literary debut. . . 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.”

"I can't remember the last book that has moved, unsettled, inspired me the way Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black did."—Lauren Christensen, The New York Times

“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.”

A New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2018

“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.”

“Like Kurt Vonnegut, the debut author introduces readers to worlds adjacent to our reality. [These stories are] quick to read, and incredibly hard to forget.” —Elle, “Best Books of the Year So Far”