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Colored Television

Written by: Danzy Senna
Narrated by: Kristen Ariza
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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.

©2024 Danzy Senna (P)2024 Penguin Audio
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What the critics say

"[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

Editorial Review

Skin deep
My skin is brown, the color of almonds (I did a side-by-side.) Every day, from morning to evening, that is how the world sees me. There is no doubt of my race, I can effortlessly check the Black box. In Danzy Senna’s must-listen audiobook, Colored Television, by the time you finish you will understand just about everything you need to know about mulattos. That’s what people who have a white parent and a Black parent are called, a word that in some circles is controversial. Mulattos often have to announce themselves, or as Senna, a mulatto, once said in an interview, she’s had to become comfortable making people uncomfortable because they don’t see her Blackness. In Colored Television, Senna exposes, explores and excites the listener with life, through Jane, a mulatto writer who has completed a major book on race. Jane’s husband, Lenny, refers to it as the “mulatto War and Peace.” It’s a hard sell. Rejection sends her to Hollywood, where she’s considered and respected by one producer as a “real writer.” Senna is a great writer. She seasons the story generously with laughter, clever word play and cold hard facts that don’t seem so bad when the writing is so good. Kristen Ariza narrates effortlessly as if she wrote the book. What it is, I think, is that she got the message. — Yvonne D., Audible Editor

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