Leah Greenblatt in Esquire:
Even in the wilting heat of a late-stage New York summer, Adjei-Brenyah cuts a striking figure; a security guard pulls away from corralling unruly tweens just to compliment his hat, a trilby in rich forest green. The guard probably has no reason to know that this elegant, soft-spoken man who quite literally would not hurt a fly is the same one who’s published two of the most explosive and unlikely literary sensations of the past five years—the astonishing 2018 story collection Friday Black and his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, released in May and now short-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction. Both are brutal, maximalist, and often gorgeously profane missiles of dystopian satire: Joseph Heller meets Jordan Peele somewhere beyond Thunderdome. The Guardian called Chain-Gang “an exuberant circus of a novel,” while The New York Times sang that its fight scenes unfold “as if Joe Rogan had fallen into a trance and assumed the diction and rhythms of Toni Morrison.”
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