![]() ![]() Organized into perfectly wild, perfectly neat episodes, it takes an irreverent, genre-bending approach to ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter. The book that vaulted Adjei-Brenyah onto the best-seller list and earned him critical accolades and film options and changed his life was his first one, the story collection Friday Black, from 2018. “They’re shooting things here! What is this?” (It turned out to be a virtual shooting range. “A shooting thing? Like, with BB guns?” I say I think that’s right, and he keeps staring at it. Then we pass what looks like a shooting range - for kids. The clothing store he worked at is, too, with a DJ in the entry spinning Rihanna. On a Saturday at the Palisades Center this spring, he finds it looks much the same as it did when he was growing up: The Barnes & Noble is still here with its mural of writers from the western canon drinking coffee. ![]() But now, Adjei-Brenyah is 32 and about to publish his second book and first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars. He worried he might never stop working at the mall. On one break, he read Kahlil Gibran, whose poem “On Houses,” from the 1923 collection The Prophet, arrived with its description of dream-filled bodies and comfort-filled homes as an invitation to engage a few years before, his mom had lost her job as a kindergarten teacher and the bank foreclosed on their house in nearby Spring Valley.Īdjei-Brenyah fueled these private study sessions with McGriddles and sweet teas from the food-court McDonald’s, sustenance that made him break out and feel awful but was cheap and caloric. Wells Tower’s surreal, tough short-story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. There were the literary magazines he discovered on the racks, like Ploughshares and The Paris Review. When Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was in high school and college, he worked at a clothing store in the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, where he spent his lunches and time between shifts at the Barnes & Noble upstairs - reading half a story, going back to work, then returning on his next break with the words still alive in his head.
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