And somehow Adjei-Brenyah retains a semblance of hope.

I think they think of it as a generosity (maybe it’s hard to remember such details) or I think, that because I, sometimes, write stories with premises that could be considered speculative or sci-fi or surreal or whatever, the nature of those premises in a broad sense steals the focus of the questions I’m asked.His debut story collection, Friday Black, is darkly humorous satire of the dystopic results of an American culture conditioned to accept the excesses of capitalism, racism, and structural violence as the norm. That is, they rarely ask me to think about the line level decisions I make on the page. I think that most interviews are pretty macro in nature. What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to? She showed me how to be a generous reader she introduced me to writers that would become my favorites, some who’d become my mentors.Īlso, she taught me that getting obliterated editorially is a love language, another important lesson in humility that a writer needs to learn at some point.

She taught me to read sentences and go to even more granular levels than that. She basically taught me how to really read, which is a writer’s most important ability. She caught me at an age (a big eyed sophomore in college) where I had a lot of desire and very little direction. And so that’s enough.īut if I had to choose one person who had a particular impact, I’d say it was/is Lynne Tillman. If somebody offered me one million dollars to write a sentence I’m pretty sure I could always do it. When I say I don’t believe in Writer’s Block, I mean that I don’t find it useful to assign a name to a state of being in which I CANNOT write. I feel like the response to this has become almost controversial, some writers, like me, assert that “there is no such thing as Writer’s Block,” others insist it is a mountain to be climbed over. He has also written for The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, so you might not be surprised to learn that he doesn’t really believe in writer’s block.Īdjei-Brenyah is back with Chain-Gang All-Stars, and took time out from the publicity blitz to answer the Lit Hub Questionnaire, offering up his go-to books for gifting, and retracing his education as a writer. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah burst onto the literary scene in 2018 with the short-story collection Friday Black, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book.

Friday black nana kwame