Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyahs dystopic first book was a surprise hit.
Hes using his second to ask harder questions.
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He worried he might never stop working at the mall.
The clothing store he worked at is, too, with a DJ in the entry spinning Rihanna.
Then we pass what looks like a shooting range for kids.
Like, with BB guns?
I say I think thats right, and he keeps staring at it.
Theyre shooting things here!
(It turned out to be avirtualshooting range.
The title story to which Universal bought the film rights is set at a mall like this.
(A girl had fallen from the top floor; her body was covered with a tarp.)
InThe Finkelstein Five,a white man kills a group of Black children with a chain saw.
I dont know, Adjei-Brenyah told one interviewer.
When you kill someone with a gun or a chain saw, theyre just as dead either way.
When I say chain saw, you have to pay attention.
TheHunger Gameslike plot finds depth in a nuanced matrix of race, sex, and gender politics.
Adjei-Brenyah is tall and handsome, doe-eyed, with an easy smile.
He has a serene exterior and a palpable interior churn like the heat off a whirring computer.
At the timeFriday Blackcame out, Adjei-Brenyah had been on a plane twice in his adult life.
When Adjei-Brenyah sold his stories film rights, he made more money than hed thought he ever would.
But something else changed too.
The illusion that happiness was on the other side of some specific achievement was shattered, he says.
I had to, like, figure out who I was besides someone striving to be a real author.
Writing used to be entangled with desperation and magical thinking.
He was at it seriously by 16.
His peers cheered these early efforts, maudlin as they were.
I remember the feeling of seeing people react to my shit.
And being like,Damn, I like that feeling.
Adjei-Brenyahs parents, Ghanaian immigrants, landed there with their three kids, of whom Nana was the second.
He calls himself a good student, if not crazy good like his sisters, both academic stars.
Between school and the mall, Adjei-Brenyah wrote intensely, even when the lights kept going out.
An eviction sent the family into a basement unit that flooded regularly.
His parents had once seemed secure, with his dad working as a criminal-defense attorney.
You could just get another hot plate.
That was the thing, he says.
But Albany proved to be an oasis.
Through a university mentorship program, he was paired withLynne Tillman, the novelist and essayist.
At a certain point, he said with tremendous genuineness, I want to be a writer.
I said, Well, what books have you read?
She remembers he looked a bit abashed.
Im like,This is literary shit going on here, Adjei-Brenyah says.
Plus there was that bleak apartment.
His reverence for Saunders took him to the M.F.A.
program at Syracuse, where the writer teaches.
(Adjei-Brenyah misheard the prompt as savethe world.)
He studied Ishmael Reed.
He developed bonds with Spiotta and Saunders that extended beyond the classroom.
He likens his time at Syracuse to a narrative time skip, where the characters come back really strong.
He stops, apologizing for the anime reference: These are specificNarutothings.
Within a year of graduating, he sold his first book.
Im not as talented a basketball player as Kevin Durant.
Im just fucking desperate.
It was this really mean irony, says Adjei-Brenyah.
Adjei-Brenyah began to feel a loss of purpose.
The desperation he had used to writeFriday Blackcouldnt sustain him.
Who are you beyond that?
Its not enough to just get people to care.
His fathers time as a defense attorney had planted a seed: Adjei-Brenyah had become interested in prison abolition.
Hed read Michelle Alexander.
Now he read the work of Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba.
He wondered if writing about abolition could help him understand how he felt about it.
Chain-Gang All-Starsfeatures footnotes, some fictional, some not.
I feel like thats more a womans experience in any power position than a mans.
Adjei-Brenyah distinguishes between his real friends and book friends, between his real world and book world.
He knows his real friends have watched his fortunes change not that they seem fazed.
Hes still getting used to the fact that he belongs in book world too.
Im so used to the wrong pronunciation.
Im so used to being on the outside, looking in.
Now his mispronounced name can be a comfort.
I feel endeared to it, he says.
It lets me know where you know me from.
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