Colored Television
Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2025
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
'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' Raven Leilani, author of Luster
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.
Reader reviews:
'A fantastic novel . . . funny and ironic and clever'
'A clever satire of the entertainment industry and the compromises artists sometimes make. If you enjoyed Yellowface, you'll likely appreciate Senna's ability to blend humour with uncomfortable truths'
'This is so sharp & funny & MESSY . . . I could not wait to see how this one turned out and had a ball reading it'
'Provides a very gripping commentary on both the literary and television world . . . The story takes such an unexpected turn, and once it does I truly couldn't put it down'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
