Meeting famous writers never makes Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah feel “weird or nerdy”, he says. After all, George Saunders was his university tutor and later became a friend. The writer’s writer Lynne Tillman was his mentor. Roxane Gay has stamped a cover quote on Friday Black, his debut short story collection, urging the world simply to “read this book”.
Since its publication last autumn, Adjei-Brenyah has had more than enough opportunities to test his reaction to meeting his literary heroes – moments such as the night in February when he unexpectedly won the book of the year prize at the PEN awards. Zadie Smith was sitting directly behind him as they read his name out. “She looked so regal and epic – her aura is so strong. And Zadie Smith had read my book!” Dazed and giggly, the 28-year-old radiates a self-assured, effervescent energy – albeit one he describes as something of a cover. “I have to be even keel about all [of this], otherwise I will go crazy,” he says.
“Before this book stuff happened, I’d been on a plane like three times in my life … Now I’m on a plane pretty much every day and it’s wild. It’s really absurd to think that people – and this is the cool part – living so far from where I’m from, have read my book and have felt anything about it, you know?” If he weren’t so genuinely excited, this might seem excessively self-effacing. “This is weird … Like I’m supposed to come into this room and think this is normal?” It is a small meeting room at his London publisher; the walls are lined with dozens of copies of his book. Adjei-Brenyah is jet lagged, which he blames for being “at least 25% less funny”. Yet all this should be his new normal. Friday Black is stunning. Adjei-Brenyah sets us in a bleak near future, “a world a little bit worse than ours”, he explains, “so maybe, collectively we could imagine a world that was much better”.
The dozen stories have been written over the course of eight or nine years, mercilessly revised and chosen by him from a bank of about 80. “Let’s say 70 of those 80 are trash. No, really, they were never going to be anything more than terrible … An idea is not enough, you could have a thousand good ideas every day. Usually, I have somebody’s voice in my mind for the stories that actually take.”
Those stories that did make the final cut have been precisely edited to work together like a concept album; in rhythm and style and beat, Adjei-Brenyah delivers a wildly creative collection that isn’t so much dealing with race, capitalism, violence, poverty, abortion and injustice as it is telling it from the inside out with blood and guts. At his most confident, he is driven by the idea that “maybe they could help someone feel seen. I thought they could push the conversation in a direction that mattered.”
Adjei-Brenyah’s work is often called “timely” and Friday Black opens with “The Finkelstein 5”, a visceral account of murdered black children, decapitated by an attacker with a chainsaw. And it doesn’t let up. He imagines a dystopia in which corpses are swept from the floors of Black Friday sales; where aborted twin foetuses, grey and dry, fight each other and compete for affection. In reference to the killer of teenager Trayvon Martin, he creates Zimmer Land: a theme park for white people to act out brutal fantasies against people of colour. Saunders describes the stories in Friday Black as “strange, crazed, urgent and funny” – and you can imagine film-makers such as Jordan Peele or Kahlil Joseph putting them on screen.
“‘Timely’ has come up a lot,” Adjei-Brenyah says, mildly weary. “I think the scary thing is that [these problems have] been there for so long … there is a certain way of black people being murdered that has become palatable. I want it to be less so.” Friday Black is only considered timely, he says, because the subjects that he has dealt with his whole life have finally reached the mainstream. “My book is being absorbed the way it is and amplified the way it is because people want to be thinking about these sorts of issues now.
“The fact that people are willing to think about it is good, but the problems that we’re trying to deal with might take a long time to sort out. It’s terrifying to think what will happen at the next election but I think overall, we’re hopefully going to trend towards something better.”
At the moment, he is preoccupied with the superrich. He doesn’t understand the accumulation of wealth in a world that is unjustifiably unequal, where one person can be living on the streets while another has 10 homes. “I’m used to being like: ‘Let me transfer $7 from this account to that account so I can have enough to pull out $20 cash.’ All of a sudden, you win this prize [the PEN award of $75,000] and I can’t even exactly understand ... I feel guilty. I’m like, you know, is anyone allowed to have that at one time? So then, how do these billionaires feel?
“It’s obviously morally wrong. It’s inherently not sustainable.” He looks quizzical, still unknotting the thread. “The government regulates how much money is in circulation, there is a pot that everyone has to share from, it’s not like it’s coming from nowhere. So you, as [a rich] individual, can be taking someone else’s money, taking from them directly. It’s almost like, what if you had an endless buffet and there’s people starved next to you and you don’t give them food? That is what you’re doing every single day.”
As the son of Ghanaian immigrants to the US – a lawyer father and teacher mother – whose health and finances both suffered in their new country, Adjei-Brenyah is wary of how good America is at conflating “morality with things … like the acquisition of stuff is a duty? It’s weird.”
His family moved from Queens, New York, when he was seven years old and settled in Spring Valley, a predominantly immigrant community 22 miles north of Manhattan. “All it takes is one person getting sick and your house is foreclosed,” he says, recalling what his family went through. “Now you’re getting evicted ... We had a period where we were comfortable – seeing that change pretty quickly is part of why I am so suspicious.”
The time he spent working in retail – a job he was only able to give up a few years ago – has also gone some way to shaping his thinking. Now he teaches at Syracuse University where he received his MFA in creative writing. He has just bought his first TV; his first laptop was bought for him by his older sister, well after he had started college and been overwhelmed by “all these kids in every class with their MacBooks.
“I had no understanding of what it was to be a writer, but I think the reason I chose it is because I became very cynical about things that can be taken away and things that I couldn’t control on my own. And writing – I can do it 100% by myself. I was insanely obsessed.”
Has the Trump presidency provided a creative impetus for him and his peers? “I wrote this book before I thought it was even possible for someone like Donald Trump to become president,” he says flatly. “He’s definitely a symptom, but now you can’t ignore it. He says and does terrible things. He’s an unrepentant misogynist in obvious ways that are trackable and traceable and recorded. He isn’t interested in pretending to be a good person by the normal standard … What is scary, in a way, is that even if he got destroyed [in the 2020 presidential elections], it doesn’t mean the problem is gone.”
It’s unlikely that the truths of Adjei-Brenyah’s stories will reach the audiences that might need them the most, but he is clear that neither artists “or policymakers [should be] pandering to the worst people, who don’t even view black people as humans in the same light as them.
“I don’t want [this book] to preach just to the choir and actually, I know I’m not. Like, in the literary world, the choir is not even exactly what I think it is because you go in any literary room anywhere and you’ll get: ‘Oh wow, we care so much. It’s racism and this, that and the other’.” He smiles apologetically and looks at the busy open-plan office space beyond the glass wall of his publisher’s office. “But, like, this room is just as white as anything else.”
Adjei-Brenyah was in college at SUNY Albany when Trayvon Martin was murdered. It was a pivotal moment for him; he and a friend created pamphlets and stayed up until 3am distributing them across campus. “We were self-righteous … We fixed racism, you know! We felt we had to galvanise, we woke up expecting to see the new world order we had ushered in.” Nothing happened. “We saw the janitor sweeping all the pamphlets away. We had pretty much just littered.” He laughs.
“I remember not liking it ... but it was good for me. Rather than saying: ‘This is me and my wisdom and this is how you do it and live your life,’ what I learned is to ask questions instead. Which is when it starts sounding corny … in that I try to ask important questions.” He does not want to sound grand. “Because even asking questions creates some kind of truth. You’ve just got to be willing to look at it hard and say something real.”
• Friday Black is published by riverrun (RRP £8.99) . To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.