September 6, 2024
Bestselling author Danzy Senna joined The Center for Fiction to discuss her new novel, Colored Television, a raucous dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the travails of the racial-identity industrial complex. Known for her previous works, including Caucasia and New People, which explore race, ambition, love, and community in 1970s Boston and 1990s Fort Greene, Senna turns her attention to contemporary Hollywood in Colored Television to create “a riveting and exhilarating novel about making art, selling out [and] being middle-aged and precariously middle class” (Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind).
Jennifer Egan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, joined Senna for a rich conversation about Colored Television’s themes and Senna’s writing process.
Featured Book
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Colored Television
By Danzy Senna
Published by Penguin Publishing Group
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.
In Conversation
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Danzy Senna
Danzy Senna
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.
Photo Credit: Dustin Snipes
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Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America and is currently Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Also a journalist, her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in the New Yorker in September, 2023.
Photo Credit: Pieter M. van Hattem
