Black Friday Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. This week our guest is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black, published in October by Mariner. Nana has an MFA from Syracuse. Has appeared, or will appear, in Esquire, Guernica, Printer’s row and the Breakwater review. He was chosen as one of the five under 35 by the National Book Foundation.Black Friday displays, in unflinching detail, the cruelty that we inflict upon another and the absurdity of that cruelty, a cruelty serration and repetitious that at some point we begin to see, for good or bad, the humor of it. The characters that we are introduced to, are uncomfortable in their own skin, whatever color. They know that something wrong, something that that can see or feel, sometimes, but sometimes lurks in shadows that we all create and retain in our own consciousness or psyche. The weird thing is that this bizarro world type stuff is placed inside our malls, or in a science fiction universe that mulls the boredom and cruelty (again) of our universe and its inhabitants. This book will survive and when it is read by future generations they will wonder if it tells the story of our world or the story of what our world almost is.Being a sixty-six year old white Jewish man, at first I thought I could relate to a book like this, but as I read it I realized that it isn’t about black or white. It is about people. What they do and how they can justify doing it. Whoever they might be.When I interview George Saunders after he wrote The Tenth of December, I really began to understand how the most serious things in life can always be turned into a joke, as I said how fortunate or unfortunate this may be.With that welcome Nana and thanks for joining us today.