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Colored Television
- A Novel
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
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Colored Television
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Publisher's summary
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.
Critic 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.”–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
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