Now That He Has Your Attention...

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s dystopic first book was a surprise hit. He’s using his second to ask harder questions.

- Mallika Rao

WHEN NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH was in high school and college, he worked at a clothing store in the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, where he spent his lunches and time between shifts at the Barnes & Noble upstairs—reading half a story, going back to work, then returning on his next break with the words still alive in his head. There were the literary magazines he discovered on the racks, like Ploughshares and The Paris Review. Wells Tower’s surreal, tough short-story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. On one break, he read Kahlil Gibran, whose poem “On Houses,” from the 1923 collection The Prophet, arrived with its description of dream-filled bodies and comfort-filled homes as an invitation to engage; a few years before, his mom had lost her job as a kindergarten teacher and the bank foreclosed on their house in nearby Spring Valley.

Adjei-Brenyah fueled these private study sessions with McGriddles and sweet teas from the food-court McDonald’s, sustenance that made him break out and feel awful but was cheap and caloric. He worried he might never stop working at the mall. But now, Adjei-Brenyah is 32 and about to publish his second book and first novel,