The End of the World as he writes it

IN HIS GRIPPING, MAXIMALIST FICTION, NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH HAS CREATED A NEW PARADIGM FOR DYSTOPIAN SATIRE AND ANNOUNCED HIMSELF AS ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING LITERARY TALENTS OF HIS GENERATION

- LEAH GREENBLATT

"I THOUGHT I CRUSHED A BUTTERFLY THE OTHER day," Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah says, sounding genuinely rueful. "I felt so bad." Today at least, the lepidoptera we have come to see at the Museum of Natural History are safe from harm: It turns out that tickets to their famed vivarium are sold out, so instead we watch through Plexiglas as their little gemstone bodies flicker and weave for a lucky scrum of schoolchildren and elaborately scarved Europeans.

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. 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." Jenna Bush Hager, scion of two American presidents, improbably chose the book-a ferocious polemic against the U.S. prison-industrial complex, centered on two queer Black women in love-for her Today-show club, Read with Jenna.