Danzy Senna

** Winner of the 2025 ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION | Finalist for the 2025 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION | Longlisted for the 2025 JOYCE CAROL OATES LITERARY PRIZE, the 2024 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FICTION PRIZE and the 2025 CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION **Named a Best Book of 2024 by TIME , NPR, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK POST, ELECTRIC LITERARTURE 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'

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024 "A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy... This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard." -LA Times "Funny, foxy and fleet...The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times A brilliant take on 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 page turning, Colored Television is Senna's most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.

‘One of the most original comic novels of the past half century’ The New Yorker‘Will leave you so giddy you’ll go and kick sand in somebody’s face’ Houston PostPerfect for fans of A Confederacy of Dunces, this is Robert Plunket’s comic masterpiece: a breakneck, unhinged romp through 1980’s LA Eliot Weiner – snob, shameless opportunist, Morris dancing-obsessive – is on a mission. He has got wind of a trunk of bawdy love letters by Warren Harding, ‘the shallowest President in history’, now guarded by his octogenarian mistress on her crumbling Hollywood Hills estate. They could reignite his failing academic career – and there’s no depth to which he won’t stoop, no preposterous scheme he won’t undertake, to get at them.With an Introduction by Danzy Senna‘The author pulled me in so deftly, that after a hundred pages, I seemed to have turned over the keys, so to speak, of my nervous system’ Frank Conroy, Washington Post ‘A riotous debut: The Aspern Papers performed by the Brothers Marx’ Time‘Nothing this funny is being written today’ Jacobin

"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."

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identityindustrial complexJane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friends luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Janes sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her mulatto War and Peace, shell have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things dont work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create diverse content for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a real writer. She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Janeuntil they go terribly wrong.

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'

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024 "A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy... This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard." -LA Times "Funny, foxy and fleet...The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times A brilliant take on 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 page turning, Colored Television is Senna's most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.

Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, NPR and THE ROOT Named A 2017 BEST SUMMER READ BYVogue - Elle - Harper's Bazaar - Glamour - Buzzfeed - In Style - Men's Journal - Bustle - Ms. Magazine - Pop Sugar - Newsday - The Millions - Time Out - Bitch - CNN's The Lead - The Fader " A] cutting take on race and class...part dark comedy, part surreal morality tale. Disturbing and delicious." -People "You'll gulp Senna's novel in a single sitting--but then mull over it for days." -Entertainment Weekly "Everyone should read it." -Vogue From the bestselling author of Caucasia, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America. As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her--yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona. Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.

From the author of the bestselling Caucasia, a sad, revealing memoir of the mixed-race marriage of her parents, and the very different American origins that brought them together and pulled them apart. When Danzy Senna's parents got married in 1968, they seemed poised to defy history. They were two brilliant young American writers from wildly divergent backgrounds--a white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage and a black man, the son of a struggling single mother and an unknown father. They married in a year that seemed to separate the past from the present; together, these two would snub the histories that divided them and embrace a radical future. When their marriage disintegrated eight years later, it was, as one friend put it, "the ugliest divorce in Boston's history"--a violent, traumatic war that felt all the more heartrending given the hopeful symbolism of their union. Decades later, Senna looks back not only at her parents' divorce but beyond it, to the opposing American histories that her parents had tried so hard to overcome. On her mother's side of the family she finds--in carefully preserved documents--the chronicle of a white America both illustrious and shameful. On her father's she discovers, through fragments and shreds of evidence, a no less remarkable history. As she digs deeper into this unwritten half of the story, she reconstructs a long buried family mystery that illuminates her own childhood. In the process, she begins to understand her difficult father, the power and failure of her parents' union, and, finally, the forces of history. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is at once a potent statement of personal identity, a challenging look at the murky waters of American ancestry, and an exploration of narratives--the narratives we create and those we forget. Senna has given us an unforgettable testimony to the paradoxes--the pain and the pride--embedded in history, family, and race.

The much anticipated sophomore novel from the bestselling author of Caucasia and the forthcoming Colored Television A young woman moves to New York City for what promises to be a dream job. Displaced, she feels unsure of her fit in the world. Then comes a look of recognition, a gesture of friendship from an older woman named Greta who shares the same difficult-to-place color of skin. On common ground, a tenuous alliance grows between two women in racial limbo. So too, does the older woman's unnerving obsession, leading to a collision of two lives spiraling out of control. A beautifully written novel, at once suspenseful, erotic, and tantalizingly clever, Symptomatic is a groundbreaking contribution to the literature of racial identity.

Birdie and her older sister Cole are so close they speak their own language. Daughters of a black academic and a white activist, Birdie appears white and Cole black, their relationship a refuge from the rest of their lives. Yet when their parents separate Birdie and Cole are thrown worlds apart.