{ "item_title" : "Colored Television (a GMA Book Club Pick)", "item_author" : [" Danzy Senna "], "item_description" : "A NATIONAL BESTSELLERA GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICKA WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEARA 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 TimesFunny, foxy and fleet...The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart. -Dwight Garner, The New York TimesA 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.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/59/354/437/0593544374_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "29.00", "online_price" : "29.00", "our_price" : "29.00", "club_price" : "29.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "29.00" } }

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There’s no little irony to the release of Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. It’s come just when all those beleaguered novelists who thought writing for TV would make them some real money are realizing that writers’ rooms are the latest creative labor bait and switch. Instead of wealth and acclaim, they’re faced with impossible demands, zero respect and such dismal pay that they still have to take a second job to cover rent. Jane Gibson and her husband Lenny belong to that class of people now called the precariat. These folks work, and may indeed be talented, but they find it tough to make a consistent living. Jane has published one novel and she’s been trying for a decade to produce a follow-up. She teaches, without tenure, to make ends meet. Lenny, supremely disdainful of just about everything and everyone, is an artist whose paintings don’t sell. Because of this, they suffer from a genteel homelessness; when we meet them they’re housesitting, yet again. This time their benefactor is Jane’s old friend Brett, who’s making a killing as a showrunner. Jane and Lenny have two young children to care for, too: Finn is bright and possibly autistic, and Ruby is now old enough to feel the effects of her family’s essentially vagabond state. Then, almost miraculously, Jane finishes her book, a doorstopper about mixed-race Black and white Americans over centuries. She has a personal connection to the topic, since she’s biracial. But when she presents the fruit of her labor to her long-suffering agent, it’s rejected (unsurprisingly, to the reader). Shocked and desperate, Jane decides to pinch Brett’s agent. Instead of a book about mixed-race people, she’ll develop a TV show about them: “The Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies,” exults a TV producer she meets with. Senna’s sense of the absurd is impeccable, evident throughout Jane’s time in what Hollywood types call “development hell,” and building toward a moment near the very end that will make you gasp, “Oh no!” The book is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.

Read our interview with Danzy Senna about Colored Television.