
Friday Black
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Narrated by:
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Corey Allen
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Carra Patterson
About this listen
A piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it's like to be young and black in America.
From the start of this extraordinary debut, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's writing will grab you, haunt you, and enrage and invigorate you. By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day in this country. These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world.
In "The Finkelstein Five", Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unforgettable reckoning of the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In "Zimmer Land", we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And "Friday Black" and "How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King" show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.
Entirely fresh in its style and perspective and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts listeners with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.
©2018 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (P)2018 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young Black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes.
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A Spy Novel for Black folk.
- By AJ Walker on 10-07-19
By: Lauren Wilkinson
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The Accidental Diva
- By: Tia Willams
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Intelligent and gorgeous, Billie Burke is a workaholic who hasn't paused since she set her sights on the top editor position at a premier beauty magazine. So far, her ambition has effectively curtailed her personal life - but now that just might change. Falling headfirst into a sexy and addictive affair with a man named Jay Lane, Billie has no idea his past will threaten their budding relationship.
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Loved it!
- By Adrienne Thompson on 09-04-17
By: Tia Willams
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Oreo
- By: Fran Ross
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb.
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Excellent book, superb performance
- By Alan on 05-10-24
By: Fran Ross
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Sweet Thunder: A Novel
- By: Ivan Doig
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In the winter of 1920, a quirky bequest draws Morrie Morgan back to Butte, Montana, from a year-long honeymoon with his bride, Grace. But the mansion bestowed by a former boss upon the itinerant charmer, debuted in Doig’s best-selling book The Whistling Season, promises to be less a windfall than a money pit. And the town itself, with its polyglot army of miners struggling to extricate themselves from the stranglehold of the ruthless Anaconda Copper Mining Company, seems - like the couple’s fast-diminishing finances—on the verge of implosion.
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Ivan Doig at his best
- By Mama bear on 02-01-14
By: Ivan Doig
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Heads of the Colored People
- Stories
- By: Nafissa Thompson-Spires
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous while others are devastatingly poignant. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship.
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What a great book
- By Trenniece on 08-01-18
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Ring Shout
- By: P. Djèlí Clark
- Narrated by: Channie Waites
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1915, The Birth of a Nation casts a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.
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The best story from a master mythmaker
- By Felicia J on 10-22-20
By: P. Djèlí Clark
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The Ballad of Black Tom
- By: Victor LaValle
- Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his black skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their trained cops. But when he delivers an occult page to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic.
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“I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day”
- By Jefferson on 11-16-19
By: Victor LaValle
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House of Hunger
- By: Alexis Henderson
- Narrated by: Jeanette Illidge
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Marion Shaw has been raised in the slums, where want and deprivation are all she knows. Despite longing to leave the city and its miseries, she has no real hope of escape until the day she spots a peculiar listing in the newspaper seeking a bloodmaid. Though she knows little about the far north—where wealthy nobles live in luxury and drink the blood of those in their service—Marion applies to the position. In a matter of days, she finds herself the newest bloodmaid at the notorious House of Hunger. There, Marion is swept into a world of dark debauchery.
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Definetely was a letdown.
- By LPST on 02-07-23
By: Alexis Henderson
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Family Lore
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Acevedo
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Acevedo, Sixta Morel, Danyeli Rodriguez del Orbe
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila.
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Underwhelming.
- By Karina on 09-18-23
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Her Body and Other Parties
- Stories
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
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Beautiful
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
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How High We Go in the Dark
- A Novel
- By: Sequoia Nagamatsu
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan, Brian Nishii, Keisuke Hoashi, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus. Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy.
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Should come with a sadness warning
- By KJH on 03-16-22
thought provoking
requires are critical mind to understand the depth of his work
Memorable
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I hope I don't sound ignorant as a white reader-i have read reviews where these haunted stories evoke a black experience that is surreal in its gruesomeness-and I can recognize this quality in many of the stories, however, for me, it rendered life as too horrific to even imagine. Perhaps that's the point.
More than violent
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Simple stories told in an ultra violent world
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By taking us into these varied yet closely related and even overlapping worlds of his fertile imagination, Adjei-Brenyah invites us not only to be seriously entertained, as we experience any number of wide-ranging and conflicting emotions. He also invites us to think deeply about the kind of world we inhabit and whether, when viewed in the mirrors of these worlds and their heroes and heroines, we like what we see.
An Authentic Magical Realist Masterpiece
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Compelling! Loved it!
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Great Science fiction
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Friday Black is both over-the-top and ethical. It’s just, well, perhaps a little too over-the-top.
Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah has a method here, and it works well in small doses. Basically, he takes a metaphor and reifies it.
These are not small does, however. They are every story, and the volume in each is turned up close to 11.
If you’re a retail worker at a mall on Black Friday, and the customers seem out of control, imagine them as a zombie horde intent on buying whatever items the marketers have set out for them. If you’re a man lamenting his role in urging his partner to get an abortion, imagine him walking around with the residue of his two fetuses (who talk to him).
The great exception here, or more appropriately the story that does this best, is the widely acknowledged “Finkelstein Five.” That one is both the most ambitious – it imagines an America proud of itself for the Trayvon Martin shooting – and the most impressively accomplished. We get a young man protagonist who, angered by an analogous shooting of five unarmed African-American youths, gradually allows himself to be radicalized.
The anger seethes in this story, and it seems to give license to the stylistic hyperbole. (I suppose it’s the lack of such immediate anger that causes me to lose patience with some of the other stories.) This feels like a legitimate echo of Richard Wright, Black anger unleashed on the page. (I’m not saying this is at the level of Wright, but I do think it’s a worthy heir to that literary tradition.)
The story may have some flaws – it is, still, blunt, and it ends abruptly – but it has real power as well. Enough power, I’d say, that I’d consider teaching it in a college class some day.
The rest of the collection, though, while it has intriguing stylistic moments and at times channels a compelling anger in other directions, seems largely adolescent to me. Over-the-top has its place, but so does subtlety, and I could use a bit more of that here.
One Sparkling Story in Over-the-top Collection
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you in.
It took me a while to get through the book. not because it wasn't good, but because they were nice
and short stories that also makes you wantta think about it for a little
So this is good to pick up, read a story then do something else..
In 2 minds about how the narrator did.. Sometimes, it was ok and sometimes his tone made me tune out..
Unique take on current events/situations
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Woof, this is intense stuff.
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a lil too powerful
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