Finalist for the 2025 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION and the ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD IN FICTION.Longlisted for the 2025 JOYCE CAROL OATES LITERARY PRIZE, the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FICTION PRIZE and the CARNEGIE MEDAL 2025.Named a Best Book of 2024 by TIME , NPR, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK POST, ELECTRIC LITERARTURE, OPRAH DAILY and more!'I LOVED this fresh, funny story . . . A true page-turner'
Daily Mail'Hilarious' Raven Leilani, author of
Luster'[A] gem from Danzy Senna . . . perceptive and bitingly funny' Vanity FairJane 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'
Industry Reviews
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.
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.
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.
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.
