“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 and captivating and essential. This book is 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. 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

“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

“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, author of the National Book Award finalist Eat the Document and Innocents and Others

"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, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Privileges and The Locals

"Adjei-Brenyah's haunting collection is a work of modern-day surrealism, offering us tales which speak to the travesties of our time. Here are the stories of Trayvon Martin, of school shootings, of bloodthirsty capitalism and its unending injustices. And here, too, are stories of good people engaged in the spiritual work of love and kindness. Adjei-Brenyah is a radical absurdist, telling truth-tales to help us all see our world more clearly. "
—Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World

“Riveting. Every word. An impassioned interrogation of the human condition on the blackhand side, a true work of wonder, just reeking of significance. Here be Nana Kwame, scaling all manner of emotional registers while maintaining a stunning textual authority. And just when you think you've settled in, here comes Anansi and the Twelve-Tongued God working other dimensions in a seamless blend. He makes it look effortless but the clarity of the craft is self-evident, a numinous voice powering stories and characters that will inhabit your consciousness long after you've finished it and tried to put it down. In this impressive debut of a literary voice both new and edgy, we find an ancient griot telling stories of startling grace, gathering folk around the sacred fire and word by word forging the visions without which the people would perish. Testimony.”
—Arthur Flowers, author of Another Good Loving Blues and I See the Promised Land

• Prepub media event in New York City
• 10-city author tour
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• Advance reading copies