Friday Black - Stories

Friday Black (2018) is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's debut collection of twelve stories that use dystopian satire and urban settings to examine systemic violence and racism in contemporary America. The collection opens with "The Finkelstein 5," where the protagonist struggles with the “scale” of his own "Blackness" following a white man’s acquittal for decapitating five black children on grounds of self-defense. In “Zimmer Land,” racism becomes sport inside a role-playing theme park where patrons act out violent justice fantasies against minority actors. The title story and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing” both tackle consumerism as a literal bloodsport, while “Through the Flash” depicts a dystopian Groundhog Day where a government weapon creates a time-loop in which the victims turn to violence to cope. Adjei-Brenyah’s prose, often compared to George Saunders, is both surreal and darkly comic, offering an unsettling reflection of real-world racial anxieties.

This American paperback original appears was released simultaneously with the British hardcover edition.

Signed copy. Signed by Adjei-Brenyah on the title page.

Softcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, paperbound, with French-folded flaps, deckled fore edge pages. New York: A Mariner Original / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. ISBN: 9781328911247. #11122.
Fine.