Episode Details

Today’s craft talk, “Why So Surrealism” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, was recorded at the 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop. Prompted by a journalist who asked him to talk about how surrealistic and speculative conceits operated in and informed Black fiction, in this craft talk Adjei-Brenyah looks at the tropes of surrealist and speculative fiction within his own work, at not only what effects they have, but what they open up for him as a writer. Adjei-Brenyah is the bestselling and critically-acclaimed writer of the story collection Friday Black and the dystopian novel Chain-Gang All-Stars.