"An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny...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 "This book is dark and captivating and essential...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." -- Roxane Gay A piercingly raw debut story collection 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 …
"An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny...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 "This book is dark and captivating and essential...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." -- Roxane Gay A piercingly raw debut story collection 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. 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. 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. 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.
More of a mixed bag than I expected given my enjoyment of Chain Gang. This is a 3.5 rounded up.
My favorite was Zimmer Land, about a park where people pay to role play situations like “a Black man walks through your neighborhood.” I also enjoyed The Finkelstein 5, Through the Flash, and Friday Black. I found Light Spitter and Lark Street too silly (as well as odd treatments of mass shooters and abortion respectively), and the rest were middling.
Themes of police brutality, Black experience, consumerism, and parenthood. Some were surreal and some were realistic. I liked the surreal ones better, even though a couple weren’t successful for me. I find them more engaging than stories of realism, so I appreciate what Adjei-Brenyah was doing with those ones in this collection.
Enjoyed having read it, even if I didn't always enjoy reading it
4 stars
Some of the stories had a level of brutality that made me far more uncomfortable than the subject matter itself. At times it felt like it was shock value for the sake of it. My personal taste is having vulnerability and humanity be the force that shatters my heart, though it's good to be reminded of another facet of experience. Having finished, there are some parts of the stories that sank in deep and will stay with me. It is not a collection I will return to, nor would I heartily recommend it to the void, yet I am happy that I've read it.
Powerful, but I don't think I could read them again? Explicitly and inventively emphasizing the violence and disregard society expects and delivers against black kids, a surreal and angry collection.
FRIDAY BLACK is a finely constructed collection of stories which range from simply invoking a certain kind of Black and American existence, to ones where the premise is inextricable from the intersection of these identities.
Some of them have not literally happened but feel like they could if reality got just a little bit worse (or, more awfully, like they’re already here). Others are more speculative, requiring some shift in reality in order to be plausible, or being altogether impossible. In all of them, the relevant social and existential rules are deftly conveyed to build tiny pockets of a different space, in which a story is told that believes its own premise unabashedly and wholeheartedly.
Three of the stories have a shared underlying reality, but I’m not certain whether the others are meant to be connected with them or not. None of the premises are mutually exclusive, but a few …
FRIDAY BLACK is a finely constructed collection of stories which range from simply invoking a certain kind of Black and American existence, to ones where the premise is inextricable from the intersection of these identities.
Some of them have not literally happened but feel like they could if reality got just a little bit worse (or, more awfully, like they’re already here). Others are more speculative, requiring some shift in reality in order to be plausible, or being altogether impossible. In all of them, the relevant social and existential rules are deftly conveyed to build tiny pockets of a different space, in which a story is told that believes its own premise unabashedly and wholeheartedly.
Three of the stories have a shared underlying reality, but I’m not certain whether the others are meant to be connected with them or not. None of the premises are mutually exclusive, but a few would definitely be oddly paired if they canonically coexist. My favorites are “Zimmer Land” (for the way it shows the precarious position of a marginalized employee in a job which objectifies his existence even as it exploits his identity), Friday Black” (for making shopping feel like a zombie story), and “Through the Flash” (for unflinchingly capturing the potential and inevitability of brutality in a certain kind of time loop).
Uneven, from distasteful sympathies (the anti-abortion Lark Street and the entitled white male murderer redemption story Light Spitter) to scintillating acuity
It might be cliche to call a book a "modern classic," but this is a modern classic. "Friday Black", "The Finklestein 5", and "Zimmer Land" should all become staples of short fiction curriculum and anthologies.
Breathtaking. Really: I found myself forgetting to breathe a few times.
The stories are hit or miss. The hits, though, are wallops; frightening; the kind of writing where you’re not entirely sure if it’s fiction, where you gulp and realize that you can envision the U.S. sliding into as reality. Dystopian not in the zombies-and-mutants sense but something much worse instead: worlds built from indifference, shallowness, blind self-centeredness.
Race plays a central role in some, but not all, of the stories. When it does, if you’re Black, you’ll probably just nod in recognition; if you’re not, you may get some glimpses into what everyday life is like for some of our neighbors. You may recoil, maybe reassure yourself that things aren’t really that bad. Aren’t they? Take some time to ponder. And let’s all of us see what we can do to move away from those possibilities.
Quick note: there …
Breathtaking. Really: I found myself forgetting to breathe a few times.
The stories are hit or miss. The hits, though, are wallops; frightening; the kind of writing where you’re not entirely sure if it’s fiction, where you gulp and realize that you can envision the U.S. sliding into as reality. Dystopian not in the zombies-and-mutants sense but something much worse instead: worlds built from indifference, shallowness, blind self-centeredness.
Race plays a central role in some, but not all, of the stories. When it does, if you’re Black, you’ll probably just nod in recognition; if you’re not, you may get some glimpses into what everyday life is like for some of our neighbors. You may recoil, maybe reassure yourself that things aren’t really that bad. Aren’t they? Take some time to ponder. And let’s all of us see what we can do to move away from those possibilities.
Quick note: there is violence. Some of it is gruesome. You should read this anyway. You should read this.
3.5 rounded up to 4 for originality. Sometimes too over the top for me but describing a reality that's also over the top. And some stories needed to be longer. I can see the Saunders influence.
