“I THOUGHT I CRUSHED A BUTTERFLY THE OTHER day,” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah says, sounding genuinely rueful. “I felt so bad.” Today at least, the lepidoptera we have come to see at the Museum of Natural History are safe from harm: It turns out that tickets to their famed vivarium are sold out, so instead we watch through Plexiglas as their little gemstone bodies flicker and weave for a lucky scrum of schoolchildren and elaborately scarved Europeans.
Even in the wilting heat of a late-stage New York summer, Adjei-Brenyah cuts a striking figure; a security guard pulls away from corralling unruly tweens just to compliment his hat, a trilby in rich forest green. The guard probably has no reason to know that this elegant, soft-spoken man who quite literally would not hurt a fly is the same one who’s published two of the most explosive and unlikely literary sensations of the past five years—the astonishing 2018 story collection and his debut novel, released in May. Both are brutal, maximalist, and often gorgeously profane missiles of dystopian satire: Joseph Heller meets Jordan Peele somewhere beyond Thunderdome. called “an exuberant circus of a novel,” while sang that its fight scenes unfold “as if Joe Rogan had fallen into ashow club, Read with Jenna.
