High-Stakes Fiction, featuring Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Ana Reyes

This is the first of our summer favorites series, featuring Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Ana Reyes. We’re revisiting our favorite episodes of the past year during the month of August, so we invite you to tune in or relisten as we celebrate and honor high-stakes fiction with two writers whose books we felt pushed the limits of fiction and made us think more critically about complex topics that wiggle their way into readers’ hearts and souls. Happy Summer!

ABOUT NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH & ANA REYES

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times-bestselling author of the short story collection, Friday Black, and now the celebrated debut novel, Chain Gang All Stars. He was selected by Colson Whitehead as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honorees, is the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Ana Reyes has an MFA from Louisiana State University. Her work has appeared in Bodega, Pear Noir, The New Delta Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles where she teaches creative writing to older adults at Santa Monica College. The House in the Pines, her debut novel, is already a Reese Witherspoon book club pick and a New York Times bestseller.