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Friday Black Paperback – Deckle Edge, October 23, 2018
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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.
“An unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice.”—New York Times Book Review
“An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny.”—George Saunders
A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, chosen by Colson Whitehead
Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book
- Print length208 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateOctober 23, 2018
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- ISBN-101328911241
- ISBN-13978-1328911247
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Friday Black INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a Best Book by: New York Times, TIME, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Huffington Post, Guardian, BuzzFeed, Newsweek,Harper’s Bazaar, Nylon, Boston Globe, Southern Living, O, the Oprah Magazine,Chicago Tribune, The Verge, The Root,Vulture, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Millions, New York Observer, Literary Hub, Color Lines,PopSugar, PEN America, The Rumpus, BookPage,St. Louis Post-Dispatch,the CBC, Longreads,Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Library Journal, The Big Issue, Chicago Public Library, My Domaine, Locus Magazine,Bookish, Read It Forward,Entropy Magazine, WAMC, Hudson Booksellers, and The Seattle Review of Books One of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honorees, chosen by Colson Whitehead Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in Fiction Winner of the Rockland Arts Council's Literary Artist Award One of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2018 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book Finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize Finalist for the American Booksellers Association's Indie Choice Book Awards Finalist for the New England Book Awards Finalist for the John Gardner Award for Fiction Finalist for the Balcones Fiction Prize An Indie Next Pick Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction Longlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award A National Indie Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller A Boston Globe Bestseller A New York Times Editors' Choice A 2019 Notable Book from the American Library Association “A powerful and important and strange and beautiful collection of stories . . . An unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice . . . A dystopian story collection as full of violence as it is of heart. To achieve such an honest pairing of gore with tenderness is no small feat . . . Violence is only gratuitous when it serves no purpose, and throughout Friday Black we are aware that the violence is crucially related to both what is happening in America now, and what happened in its bloody and brutal history . . . In smart, terse prose, Adjei-Brenyah is unflinching, and willing, in most of these 12 stories, to leave us without any apparent hope. But the hope is there—or if it isn’t hope, it’s maybe something better: levelheaded, compassionate protagonists, with just enough integrity and ambivalence that they never feel sentimental. Each of these individuals carries a subtle clarity about what matters most when nothing makes sense in these strange and brutal worlds he builds . . . Adjei-Brenyah’s voice here is as powerful and original as Saunders’s is throughout Tenth of December . . . [Adjei-Brenyah] is here to signal a warning, or perhaps just to say this is what it feels like, in stories that move and breathe and explode on the page. In Friday Black, the dystopian future Adjei-Brenyah depicts&mdash —
About the Author
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH is the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black. Originally from Spring Valley, New York, he graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Literary Hub, the Paris Review, Guernica, and Longreads. He was selected by Colson Whitehead as one of the National Book Foundation's “5 Under 35” honorees, is the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Then his phone rang, and he woke up.
He took a deep breath and set the Blackness in his voice down to a 1.5 on a 10-point scale. "Hi there, how are you doing today? Yes, yes, I did recently inquire about the status of my application. Well, all right, okay. Great to hear. I'll be there. Have a spectacular day.' Emmanuel rolled out of bed and brushed his teeth. The house was quiet. His parents had already left for work.
That morning, like every morning, the first decision he made regarded his Blackness. His skin was a deep, constant brown. In public, when people could actually see him, it was impossible to get his Blackness down to anywhere near a 1.5. If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0.
Though Emmanuel was happy about scoring the interview, he also felt guilty about feeling happy about anything. Most people he knew were still mourning the Finkelstein verdict: after twenty-eight minutes of deliberation, a jury of his peers had acquitted George Wilson Dunn of any wrongdoing whatsoever. He had been indicted for allegedly using a chain saw to hack off the heads of five black children outside the Finkelstein Library in Valley Ridge, South Carolina. The court had ruled that because the children were basically loitering and not actually inside the library reading, as one might expect of productive members of society, it was reasonable that Dunn had felt threatened by these five black young people and, thus, he was well within his rights when he protected himself, his library-loaned DVDs, and his children by going into the back of his Ford F-150 and retrieving his Hawtech PRO eighteen-inch 48cc chain saw.
The case had seized the country by the ear and heart, and was still, mostly, the only thing anyone was talking about. Finkelstein became the news cycle. On one side of the broadcast world, anchors openly wept for the children, who were saints in their eyes; on the opposite side were personalities like Brent Kogan, the ever gruff and opinionated host of What's the Big Deal?, who had said during an online panel discussion, 'Yes, yes, they were kids, but also, fuck niggers.' Most news outlets fell somewhere in-between.
On verdict day, Emmanuel's family and friends of many different races and backgrounds had gathered together and watched a television tuned to a station that had sympathized with the children, who were popularly known as the Finkelstein Five. Pizza and drinks were served. When the ruling was announced, Emmanuel felt a clicking and grinding in his chest. It burned. His mother, known to be one of the liveliest and happiest women in the neighborhood, threw a plastic cup filled with Coke across the room. When the plastic fell and the soda splattered, the people stared at Emmanuel's mother. Seeing Mrs. Gyan that way meant it was real: they'd lost. Emmanuel's father walked away from the group wiping his eyes, and Emmanuel felt the grinding in his chest settle to a cold nothingness. On the ride home, his father cursed. His mother punched honks out of the steering wheel. Emmanuel breathed in and watched his hands appear, then disappear, then appear, then disappear as they rode past streetlights. He let the nothing he was feeling wash over him in one cold wave after another.
But now that he'd been called in for an interview with Stich's, a store self-described as an 'innovator with a classic sensibility' that specialized in vintage sweaters, Emmanuel had something to think about besides the bodies of those kids, severed at the neck, growing damp in thick, pulsing, shooting blood. Instead, he thought about what to wear.
In a vague move of solidarity, Emmanuel climbed into the loose-fitting cargoes he'd worn on a camping trip. Then he stepped into his patent-leather Space Jams with the laces still clean and taut as they weaved up all across the black tongue. Next, he pulled out a long-ago abandoned black hoodie and dove into its tunnel. As a final act of solidarity, Emmanuel put on a gray snapback cap, a hat similar to the ones two of the Finkelstein Five had been wearing the day they were murdered'a fact George Wilson Dunn's defense had stressed throughout the proceedings.
Emmanuel stepped outside into the world, his Blackness at a solid 7.6. He felt like Evel Knievel at the top of a ramp.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; First Edition (October 23, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1328911241
- ISBN-13 : 978-1328911247
- Item Weight : 6.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #33,314 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #219 in Fiction Satire
- #240 in Short Stories Anthologies
- #2,935 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is from Spring Valley, New York. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University.
He was the '16-'17 Olive B. O'Connor fellow in fiction at Colgate University.
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row, Gravel, and The Breakwater Review, where he was selected by ZZ Packer as the winner of the 2nd Annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest. Friday Black is his first book.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on April 13, 2019
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What is different about F5 is the response of Emmanuel and a band of enraged blacks that have finally had enough. Its rage and its righteousness cut to the quick. Both stories shine and resonate with a sparse prose embellished by tremendous passion and fury or the opposite—a zombie-like stasis induced by “The Good”. The Era freezes the soul with an indifference to the disenfranchised that is merely a tilt in the lens from the present day.
In both tales real emotion; true feeling and experience is continually repressed, denied, delayed until it simmers and then boils over with explosive consequence. In F5 the author calculates “blackness” on a scale of 1-10 in ways that are hilarious and heartbreaking. Every black person, especially men, must tamp it down to get by, though none can ever eliminate it entirely. The Hospital Where is a pitch-perfect immersion into the role of the story-teller and the fears and indignities inflicted upon the poor and the vulnerable. Dollops of magical realism remind the reader of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon--without the soaring souls.
Other stories are equally impressive; one or two, not so much. Lark Street, an imagining of a teenage girl’s aborting twin fetuses with the RU486 pill and her young boyfriend’s interaction with their unborn seemed contrived. For me though it was the exception. Zimmer Land is an interesting hybrid shining a harsh light on Florida's Stand Your Ground law and the violent obsession of men with gaming. It feels though more like an episode of Black Mirror than a short story but perhaps that's the point. The last story, Through The Flash is a hybrid like none I've ever seen--Groundhog Day meets Fight Club meets Mad Max. Terrifying but affirming.
Very few of these tales miss the mark by much, or at all. Most have that intrinsic quality found in all great literature—familiar and specific to a time and place (or people) but universal in themes and emotion. Friday Black is a great accomplishment; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is an enormous talent. Highly recommended.
in other stories, written as racial neutral, adjei-brenyah explores morrison’s idea closer. as he scrutinizes contemporary issues, one gets the impression the world is crazy enough without obsession of the racial other.
the issues of our times, teen suicide, racial hatred, the calloused superiority of retail workers controlling shoppers lusting for material goods with bargains and sales, and tales of life after the apocalypse, explored by adjei-brenyah are closer to the footsteps of colson whitehead than cormac mccarthy, though readers of mccarthy should not overlook adjei-brenyah’s stories.
the story Friday Black takes place in a big-box-store on black friday, the customers out for blood, literally, in their desire for one-time bargains. they grunt disconnected phrases about brand name products, a language not understood by many service workers, pressed to repel hordes of shopper zombies with sale items and deep cut bargains.
imagine that george saunders and peter straub at his most gory as nana kwame adjei-brenyah’s uncles.
when adjei-brenyan isn’t reveling in graphic violence he’s writing about mind numbing experiences of attending school within a dystopian system or working a low paying job, and questions what if these situations were forever.
there’s an intelligence at work here, not a pretty intelligence, but it’s here. nana kwame adjei-brenyah is the kind of writer you want to hear more from.
A series of short stories, all more or less loosely connected by the horror of being black under the particularly vicious capitalism adopted by the United States. All stories feature a particularly unflinching examination of the violence of this all, varying from the direct violence of black people being lynched, to the indirect violence of a consumerist society, one that worships Mammon. To say much more, I feel, would spoil too much. The stories shocked my not easily shocked senses and the author has a disturbingly clear view of how a violent mind and society can operate. You'll simply have to read the stories, and hopefully with this trigger warning: it's not for the faint of heart.
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If I could rate it higher than five stars, I would. Buy this book. It deserves to be read.












