DESCRIPTION

A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia

Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane's sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel--a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her "mulatto War and Peace." Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.

But things don't work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a "real writer," and together they begin to develop "the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies." Things finally seem to be going right for Jane--until they go terribly wrong.

Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna's most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Danzy Senna is the bestselling author of six previous books, including Caucasia, New People, and most recently Colored Television. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.

REVIEWS

AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK

"A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy... This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard." -LA Times

"Funny, foxy and fleet...The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Delightfully head spinning. Senna unfurls a novel that somehow deconstructs its own racial preoccupations, as though she's riding a unicycle up and down a set of Escher staircases...The way [she] keeps this wry story aloft may be the closest paper can come to levitation."—The Washington Post

"[A] cutting exploration of an artist's striving and dreaming and flailing in the shadow of Hollywood's dream factory. . . exhilarating yet poignant. . .endlessly quotable and intensely, meaningfully provocative. . .Senna's ungentle satire masterfully explores and explodes the psyche . . .of a woman trying to level up on family, work and race in a post-post-racial America."—NPR

"Funny, foxy and fleet. . .The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart. The characters in Colored Television are wonderful talkers; they're wits and improvisers who clock the absurdities of the human condition. You often feel you're listening in on a three-bottles-into-it dinner party."—The New York Times

"Senna's humor mixes with her deep understanding of cultural foibles and the human heart to produce a novel that is simultaneously a laugh-out-loud cultural comedy and a riveting novel of ideas . . . .The complexity of all of these issues contained in a single novel might have intimidated a lesser writer. Senna turns what could have been heavy into a celebratory triumph filled with joy and love. . . This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard."—Los Angeles Times