Universal Pictures has optioned rights to the title story of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s New York Times bestseller Friday Black. A collection of short stories from Mariner Books, Friday Black explores the inhumanity, injustice and a hope that persists in black American life, often with a surrealist eye.
Adjei-Brenyah will adapt the script for the film and executive produce while “Deadpool 2” and “Hobbs & Shaw” helmer David Leitch will produce. No director has been set.
“Friday Black” is the seventh story in the book and is set on Black Friday in a dystopian near future. The protagonist, a department store salesman, copes with vicious, insatiable Black Friday shoppers while attempting to win a sales contest among employees, in order to give the prize jacket to his mother as a gift.
Friday Black is the first book from Adjei-Brenyah, and was one of last year’s National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award recipients. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications including Guernica, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row, Gravel and The Breakwater Review, where he was selected by ZZ Packer as the winner of the second annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest.
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