I want you to remember a single word: Freedom. It sounds better than prison or death or fear, doesn’t it?

 I wish I could own those words, but I borrowed them from a brilliant storyteller named Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, whose collection of short stories in “Friday Black” has created a fuss in literary circles.

Adjei-Brenyah is in his mid-30s. He’s Black, too. The latter might be a more important point to make than the former, because the expectations for a Black man his age, even one with a master’s, aren’t great.

I heard about his literary gifts from a mutual friend, a college roommate of his whom I’ve known for eight years. He told me years ago about Adjei-Brenyah, and I looked forward to reading his work.

Like Adjei-Brenyah, I’m a storyteller, but I don’t write fiction as he does. My genre is nonfiction. I do, however, appreciate a story told well — fictional or otherwise. He’s a storyteller to watch.

In his debut work, Adjei-Brenyah dazzled with cleverness. His writing was elegant yet primal; it captured universal themes that he dipped heavily in the black diaspora. For what person — Black or white — can’t relate to his story “Things My Mother Said,” the shortest piece in his collection.

To discuss Adjei-Brenyah’s writing without a mention of “Finkelstein 5” would do an injustice to the man’s inaugural book. For if a signature piece exists in it, that piece would be “Finkelstein 5,” the rawest and most disturbing of the 12 short stories.

No contemporary writer of color has dared to see race through the same lens as Adjei-Brenyah does. Perhaps Richard Wright’s “Native Son” had elements of “Finkelstein 5,” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” carried similar depth, though longer, less brooding and not as dark in tone.

A better way to look at Adjei-Brenyah’s writing would be not to compare it to anybody else’s prose. Yes, of course, critics will see Adjei-Brenyah as the next James Baldwin, a comparison that makes no sense with such a small body of work. But Baldwin wasn’t Baldwin until he did have more work to judge.

That’s what excites people like me about Adjei-Brenyah, because the question we all ask is this: How far does he go in literature?

The challenge he faces is to build on his first entry into serious literature. He can’t let his first work be all the greatness in him. It can’t be — it just can’t be. He’s shared a vision of the world around him that is singularly his, and he — and only he — can tell such stories.

He’s no Baldwin, but who is?

But if his goal were to become the next Baldwin, Adjei-Brenyah has limited himself. So he ought to ignore such talk, forging a career as a fiction writer who has no constraints. The only limit on his ability should be his imagination, which seems boundless if “Friday Black” tells critics anything.

Adjei-Brenyah is free to take his imagination wherever he wants to go, and he will find plenty of readers who are willing to join him on his trek. But go somewhere, young man. Write on … because that’s the gift of yours — a gift given to so few people. The journey is liberating — the kind of liberation that comes when a man’s mind hears “freedom” and enjoys the sound of it.