Friday Black

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

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, captivating and essential. This books is a call to arms and it is 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

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has written an exciting, dazzling collection of stories. He writes with a ferocious wit and a big heart. His inventive fictional worlds speak both directly and covertly to this political moment in unexpected and fresh ways. Friday Black marks the thrilling debut of an important new voice in fiction. - Dana Spiotta

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a name you better get used to saying. The funny, uncompromising voice heard here for the first time, one that's not afraid to wander past the checkpoints of realism in order to get at the nature of the American real, will be with us for a long time to come. The Finkelstein Five already reads like a classic even though it stings like it was written this morning - Jonathan Dee

A surreal, startling debut collection . . . where everyday storylines are pushed, as in episodes of Black Mirror, to darkly funny extremes . . . Composed with brio and rare imaginative power, Friday Black recaptures the strange fear and excitement we first feel as child readers, when we begin to learn that Grimms' fairytales are approximations of the real world. - Guardian