Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Magic City Books is excited to welcome Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah for a free event celebrating the release of his new novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars on Thursday May 11, 2023 at All Souls Unitarian Church, 2952 S Peoria Avenue. Joining Nana Kwame will be author and literary translator Jennifer Croft.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is one of the most eagerly anticipated novels of 2023, it tells the story of two top women gladiators who fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own system.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black.  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.

This event is free and open to the public. At the conclusion of the conversation, Adjei-Brenyah will be signing copies of Chain-Gang All-Stars which will be for sale at the event. You can pre-order a copy through Magic City Books at: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/chain-gang-all-stars/973.

About Chain-Gang All-Stars

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.