Name: Nana Kwame-Brenyah
Start: 2024-06-04T19:30:00-07:00
End: 2024-06-04T19:30:00-07:00
Location: The Great Hall

Nana Kwame-Brenyah

Chain-Gang All-Stars

Date:: Tuesday, June 4
Time:: 7:30 pm PDT
Cost:: $12-$116

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Venue

: The Great Hall
: 1119 Eighth Avenue (enter on Eighth Avenue)
Seattle, 98101 United States + Google Map

Organizer

: Seattle Arts & Lectures
Email: grajendran@lectures.org
: View Organizer Website

Note: A livestream of this event will be available.

For questions about this event, please contact grajendran@lectures.org or call (206) 621-2230.

Rentals

From National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honoree, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s hotly anticipated debut novel Chain-Gang All-Stars has swept the bestseller charts.

In this explosive novel, two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far removed from America’s own. From the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black, Adjei-Brenyah paints a dystopian world blazingly close to our own.

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.

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.

Lisa Lucas is the SVP & Publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books at Penguin Random House. Formerly, she was Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, the Publisher of Guernica, and the Director of Education at the Tribeca Film Institute.