Adjei-Bremyah, Nana Kwame
Entry updated 12 June 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1991- ) US author who – after some nonfantastic work – began to publish work of genre interest with "The Finkelstein 5" in Printer's Row for July 2016. This and several other early stories, all intensely written and mostly set in surrealized Near Future venues, were assembled as Friday Black (coll 2018); the cruel arenas, and the dramas unfolded within them, sustainedly represent an understanding of America as a carceral state, institutionally structured to effectively control and literally criminalize ethnic minorities (see Race in SF). To represent a Dystopian America forthrightly in terms of this sort of ineradicable exercise of power, though not entirely original, is here conveyed with dark gusto. The carceral nightmares unpacked in Adjei-Bremyah's first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023), where those stigmatized by the state can earn "freedom" by becoming to-the-death gladiators in a Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program, are similarly mediated through gonzo dexterities of telling. [JC]
Nana Kwame Adjei-Bremyah
born Spring Valley, New York: 1991
works
- Chain-Gang All-Stars (New York: Pantheon Books, 2023) [hb/]
collections and stories
- Friday Black (New York: Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books, 2018) [coll: pb/]
links
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