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“Incisive, of the moment, and darkly funny, I loved everything about Colored Television. Very few contemporary authors can so acutely examine race and class while maintaining a razor-sharp sense of humor, but Danzy Senna is in a league of her own.”
— David Vogel • Literati Bookstore
Bookseller recommendation
“This is one of those stories that you politely DEMAND people read! The jokes landed each and every time! As always, there was much needed commentary that makes you want to talk about this story with anyone who will listen. This should be an Instant buy for any book club, because you are going to want to discuss this! ”
— Shakeria • Lark & Owl
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 compulsively listenable, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
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.
Reviews
Praise for Colored Television:“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
“Hilarious.”—Boston Globe
“[A] gem from Danzy Senna—more perceptive and bitingly funny than ever.”—Vanity Fair
“With one hilarious scene and outrageous observation after another, Senna hits it out of the park.” —Newsday
“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
“The biting, incisive, and hilarious Colored Television. . . skewers Hollywood culture while offering a thoughtful take on how creatives balance making art with making a living.” —Real Simple
“A no-holds-barred satire of literary ambition and Hollywood seduction with a racing human heart. . .With her sharp eye and take-no-prisoners humor, Senna exposes both the specific absurdities of the publishing world and the universal absurdities of trying—and inevitably failing—to have it all.”—Oprah Daily
"[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
“Hilarious. Senna writes with tenderness about the debasement of aspiration, and she renders with acuity the mad place in the mind where fixation meets avoidance." —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 Expand reviews