Friday Black

Paperback, 194 pages

English language

Published by Mariner Books.

ISBN:
978-1-328-91124-7
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
1022977777

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (16 reviews)

In the stories of Adjei-Brenyah’s debut, an amusement park lets players enter augmented reality to hunt terrorists or shoot intruders played by minority actors, a school shooting results in both the victim and gunman stuck in a shared purgatory, and an author sells his soul to a many-tongued god.

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. These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world.

6 editions

Review of 'Friday Black' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

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.

Review of 'Friday Black' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

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 …

Review of 'Friday Black' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

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 …

avatar for sgreene

rated it

4 stars
avatar for Aardinkvis

rated it

4 stars
avatar for mrkvm

rated it

3 stars
avatar for JaminBogi

rated it

3 stars
avatar for AnsgarFrej

rated it

4 stars
avatar for CapnJazzHandz

rated it

5 stars
avatar for camdotbio

rated it

4 stars

Subjects

  • Racism
  • Fiction