Colored Television: A Novel (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

by Danzy Senna

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Get everything you’ve ever wanted and lounge on borrowed time in Hollywood until it turns you upside down. Danzy Senna’s quick wit and wry voice has the big-heartedness of Dolly Alderton and the sensibility of Sally Rooney; readers of Miranda July’s All Fours and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It will want to tell all their friends about this smart and sharp tale.

This Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition includes an exclusive conversation between the author and New York Times bestselling novelist, Rumaan Alam, as well as a reader's guide.

"A riveting and exhilarating novel about making art and selling out…Senna is one of this country’s most thrilling writers.” –Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

A brilliant dark comedy about 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798217044856
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Edition description:	Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Danzy Senna is the author of four previous works of fiction, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, New People, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.

Editorial Reviews

Narrator Kristen Ariza lends her expert skills to this intimate character study. The story follows Jane, a biracial author who is struggling with finishing her novel, which she believes to be revolutionary. She moves her family near Hollywood, where she meets a producer who wants to make her book into a television show. Jane is a complex character who is often skeptical, and when she is met with the usual difficulties while navigating Hollywood, she becomes even more suspicious. Ariza narrates Jane's perspective with care, which is imperative for a story grounded in the issues of mixed-race people. The performance will also challenge listeners with the characters' authentic thoughts and emotions. A great listen for fans of contemporary fiction. G.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2024 - AudioFile

04/15/2024

A struggling Los Angeles novelist succumbs to Hollywood’s siren call in the mordant latest from Senna (Caucasia). Jane, the daughter of an interracial couple, is on a one-year sabbatical from her creative writing professorship. She’s trying to finish her sprawling, long-languishing second novel, a “mulatto War and Peace” about literature’s mixed-race heroines. When her editor reacts to the manuscript with confusion, Jane questions her commitment to an art form that, in her view, has been superseded by prestige television: “Being a novelist in Los Angeles was not unlike being an Amish person.” Concealing her plan from her husband, an abstract painter unwilling to make concessions to the market, Jane successfully pitches an idea for a biracial comedy to Hampton Ford, a Black TV showrunner looking for “diverse content,” and is plunged into the shark-filled waters of Hollywood creators. The novel generates some suspense through Jane’s and Ford’s various ethical lapses, but it’s predominantly carried along by the strength of Senna’s sardonic voice, which homes in on everything from the photogenic qualities of mixed-race children (“No one wants to have white babies anymore”) to the debilitating effects on a writer of leading fiction workshops, which Senna likens to a “series of mini-strokes.” The result is a complex and satisfying portrait of a woman at odds with the categories that define her. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Colored Television:

"[A] brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book."—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED

“A complex and satisfying portrait of a woman struggling with the categories that define her.” –Publishers Weekly

"I couldn’t stop turning the pages, and only when it was all over did I realize what Senna had done. Addictive, hilarious and relatable, yes, but Colored Television is after something larger and more elusive, a very modern reckoning with the ambiguities triangulated by race, class, creativity and love. She nails it."—Miranda July, author of All Fours and The First Bad Man

“A riveting and exhilarating novel about making art and selling out, about being middle aged and precariously middle class. As fearless as she is funny, Danzy Senna is one of this country’s most thrilling writers.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

"Colored Television is hilarious. Senna writes with tenderness about the debasement of aspiration, and renders with acuity the mad place in the mind where fixation and avoidance are joined." —Raven Leilani, author of Luster

“If you thought California was burning before, wait until you read how literary arsonist Danzy Senna gleefully incinerates its values through the eyes of Jane Gibson—a heroine whose insecurity, mistakes, and lies will keep you riveted from start to finish.” —James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods and Nobody Gives a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

“Twisty, turny, and refreshingly relatable. You'll read and wonder, ‘Is she in my head?’ I adore this novel.”—Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck

From the Publisher

★ 2024-05-04
When her second novel hits a wall, a biracial California writer makes a desperate attempt to start a TV career.

One of the funniest scenes in this brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book happens early on, in a flashback to the party in Brooklyn where Jane met Lenny, her husband and the father of their two kids. Feeling that she’s aging out of the dating game, Jane has recently consulted an “intuitive psychodynamic counselor with a specialty in racial alchemy,” aka a psychic, who told her she’s about to meet her future husband, a funny, tall, handsome Black man who would be wearing “West Coast shoes.” But when she meets Lenny, who seems to perfectly fit this description, he’s with a very possessive White girlfriend. “Ebony and ivory, together in disharmony...perhaps because it was her origin story, she could not bear the sight of interracial love.” She calls the psychic from the party to confirm. The psychic says it’s definitely him, and then goes into a rant against intermarriage. “Listen, our ancestors didn’t survive the horrors of the Middle Passage so some Caucasoid poet could miscegenate us out of existence.” He also says that if she doesn’t get this guy, she’ll be alone for 24 years. That gets her moving. And since Senna is married to the writer Percival Everett, it’s kind of fun to imagine that this intellectual, anti-capitalist, abstract visual artist husband is sort of...yeah. But that’s just one of the great things. The rant about teaching Gen Z versus Millennial college students is sure to kill any college professor (“She had in recent years begun to assign only minimalist autofiction by queer POC authors to her undergraduates, and she had to admit it was a better classroom experience for all”), and the story of Jane’s doomed second novel, an opus on biracial characters in history that she’s spent 10 years writing, is literary satire par excellence, like R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface or Everett’s Erasure. Anyone who’s ever been obsessed with a Hanna Andersson catalog: You are also the target market. The only reason we said “almost perfect” earlier is that there’s a big plot twist that doesn’t quite compute, but if you care, that makes one of us.

That’s entertainment.

Kirkus Reviews