Danzy Senna joins us for an episode celebrating September’s best books.

On this episode of Fully Booked, we’re kicking off the book world’s biggest month by highlighting some must-read September releases. First, fiction editor Laurie Muchnick, new nonfiction editor John McMurtrie, and young readers’ editors Mahnaz Dar and Laura Simeon share some of their top picks in books for the month. Then, Danzy Senna joins me to discuss her hotly anticipated new novel, Colored Television (Riverhead, Sept. 3).

Senna is an award-winning novelist and essayist, based in Los Angeles, who teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. She is the author of six books, including Caucasia, You Are Free, and New People, which was named one of the Top 10 Novels of 2017 by Time.“When her second novel hits a wall, a biracial California writer makes a desperate attempt to start a TV career,” Kirkus writes in a starred review of Colored Television, whose kicker simply states: “That’s entertainment.”

Here’s a bit more of our review: “One of the funniest scenes in this brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book happens early on, in a flashback to the party in Brooklyn where Jane met Lenny, her husband and the father of their two kids. Feeling that she’s aging out of the dating game, Jane has recently consulted an ‘intuitive psychodynamic counselor with a specialty in racial alchemy,’ aka a psychic, who told her she’s about to meet her future husband, a funny, tall, handsome Black man who would be wearing ‘West Coast shoes’.…But that’s just one of the great things. The rant about teaching Gen Z versus millennial college students is sure to kill any college professor, and the story of Jane’s doomed second novel, an opus on biracial characters in history that she’s spent 10 years writing, is literary satire par excellence.…The only reason we said ‘almost perfect’ earlier is that there’s a big plot twist that doesn’t quite compute, but if you care, that makes one of us.”

Senna and I begin by talking about Colored Television’sprotagonist, Jane, a struggling novelist living in LA with her husband Lenny (a painter) and their two children. I borrow a question Lenny asks Jane the night they meet—So what world do you write about?—to which Senna gamely responds. We agree that Jane isn’t grappling with her identity; she’s deciding whether and how to monetize it. We talk about what a funny novel Colored Television is, whether comedy is hard to write, and the hot wire of anger undergirding the very best comedy. We talk about poet mothers (with apologies to ours), the essential loneliness of art-making, the necessity, in an artistic partnership, of protecting one another’s solitude, following one’s obsessions, scarcity mindsets, moral ambiguity, and much more.

BEST BOOKS OF SEPTEMBER 2024:

Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead)

Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee (Norton)

Uprooted: A Memoir About What Happens When Your Family Moves Back by Ruth Chan (Roaring Brook Press)

Ruin Road by Lamar Giles (Scholastic)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR:

Beneath the Scarlet Frost by Marissa Miller

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.