Friday Black

(Mariner, $15)

The arrival of this remarkable shortstory collection “announces a new and necessary American voice,” said

in The New York Times. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut, “as full of violence as it is of heart,” exaggerates current realities “only ever so slightly,” and always to help us see the truth more clearly. In his title story, American post–Thanksgiving Day sales so routinely result in deaths at the mall that clearing corpses is just part of the job. In “The Finkelstein 5,” a white man claims self-defense—successfully—after decapitating five black children with a chain saw. In “The Era,” a teenager can’t get enough of a socially sanctioned drug called Good. No reader of George Saunders could be surprised that Saunders mentored Adjei-Brenyah, said in The Wall Street Journal. The best story here, set in an amusement park where visitors can shoot at black and Muslim actors, is particularly indebted to Saunders’ “queasily comic” futurist satires. Friday Black is an auspicious start. “But the real fun will come in watching the student’s attempt to escape the shadow of—or even surpass—the master.”