In this, Adjei-Brenyah offers a prime example of what fiction can do, with more visceral effect and versatility than nonfiction, particularly in a time of political and cultural upheaval.

Nico Walker Feels Lucky To Tell His Story.Just as Adjei-Brenyah seamlessly shifts genres – realism, sci-fi, fantasy – throughout the collection, he shifts tones, too, often pulling back from the work’s edges to reveal the persistence and beauty of our shared humanity. Stripped of civility and language, “ravenous humans howl,” and the story’s hero, an ambitious young black salesman with a sixth sense for interpreting the chaos, is bitten on the arm and left with “a jagged smile…a sickle…a lucky Friday scar.” However captivating the story’s blunt energy, its real gift to the reader is its unexpected juxtapositions. In the collection’s title story, published in Esquire’s pages this month, a flagship mall’s Black Friday sales are a fight-to-the-death bid for the latest in flat-screen TVs and brand-name fur-lined down jackets. He uses satire to push what has become tragically, bitterly commonplace – dehumanizing consumerism, racism, and the hypocrisy that covers for these – to extremes, to underscore the fault-lines and the flashpoints, the laugh-out-loud absurdity and the pain.

Toni Morrison, when asked in a Paris Review interview how black writers write in a landscape “dominated and informed by their relationship to white culture,” answered, “alter language, open it up, blast its racist straightjacket.” In his debut story collection, Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah achieves just that.

Adjei brenyah