Check This Out!: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Online
Author Rachel Barenbaum interviews author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah about his new novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars
Thank you to The Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation and The Howe Library Corporation for sponsoring this series.
This event will be held on Zoom. You can register in advance for a Zoom invite here.
You can also view the program on Facebook and YouTube.
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.
Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a “new and necessary American voice” (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review).
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH is the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He was a National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honoree, the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Saroyan Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book, along with many other honors. Raised in Spring Valley, New York, he now lives in the Bronx.
ATOMIC ANNA is Rachel's second novel. The New York Times Book Review said it was “masterfully plotted." Her debut, A BEND IN THE STARS, was named a New York Times Summer Reading Selection and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Rachel is a prolific writer, reviewer and podcast host. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, the LA Review of Books, and more. She is a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis. In a former life she was a hedge fund manager and spin instructor. She has degrees from Harvard in Business, and Literature and Philosophy. She is an elected Town Meeting Member in Brookline, MA.
- Date:
- Thursday, May 25, 2023
- Time:
- 2:00pm - 2:30pm
- Time Zone:
- Eastern Time - US & Canada (change)
- Online:
- This is an online event.
- Event URL:
- https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpdu-rpzoqE9MPwObRvAXIiL8l5YMV_IDY
- Categories:
- Adult