Danzy Senna’s “Colored Television”

Kate Wolf talks to Danzy Senna about her latest novel, “Colored Television.”

By LARB Radio HourSeptember 6, 2024

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Kate Wolf talks to Danzy Senna about her latest novel, Colored Television. It follows a writer named Jane Gibson who’s finally making headway on her second book, a magnus opus her husband calls the “mulatto War and Peace” that’s been nearly a decade in the making. Jane’s helped along by her family’s stay in the tony, Eastside Los Angeles home of a friend of hers—a former fiction writer who long ago sold out to work in TV. Jane and her husband, Lenny, help themselves to this friend’s wine and clothes, and Jane yearns for his financial stability. When her novel is rejected by her agent, she decides to try on his career in Hollywood as well. Colored Television is a hilarious unpacking of class, marriage, race, midlife, exploitation, Los Angeles, and what it takes to be an artist when no one cares about your work.

Also, Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman, returns to recommend a trilogy of historical novels by Sharon Kay Penman: Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, and The Reckoning.