His themes cartwheel with intensity, from the venom of consumerism to the unbelievably bizarre ways racism shows up in speculative realms. “Zimmer Land” was about an amusement park where gun-happy white patrons shoot Black people for fun, while “Lark Street” dealt with the fantastical aftermath of abortion. In his 2018 story collection Friday Black, Adjei-Brenyah didn’t purely write about imminent dystopias, he anchored them with moral stakes. And because he is a builder of worlds dark and twistedly terrifying, I am curious if he sees his work as hopeful-or is the future really that bleak? “Even just me being a Knicks fan means I’m a hopeful person,” he says.
A canny conductor of the macabre, Adjei-Brenyah writes profoundly about dystopia. When I reach author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on the first Monday in May, on the eve of his debut novel’s publication, he explains, in so many words, that being a lifelong New York Knicks fan has taught him what it means to have absolute faith in a losing enterprise.
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