We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article."Colored Television" (Riverhead Books), a satirical novel from Danzy Senna (the bestselling author of "Caucasia"), features a writer who can't sell her ambitious book about biracial people in history, who considers selling out to Hollywood by transforming it into a TV sit-com.Read an excerpt below. "Colored Television" by Danzy Senna $23 at Amazon Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.Try Audible for free Today they were going to an open house in the neighborhood Jane had nicknamed Multicultural Mayberry, the neighborhood where she'd always wanted them to live.
The house was way out of their price range, given that their price range was zero.But who really knew what their price range might be soon? It couldn't hurt to look.
If Josiah offered a lot of money and Lenny sold some paintings, on top of Jane's getting tenure and a raise, who knew? They might become members of the functioning middle class sooner than they thought.Multicultural Mayberry was only about fifteen minutes from downtown Los Angeles, but it felt like a different world altogether.Gone was the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome energy of downtown.
Gone was the Manson Family Helter Skelter vibe of the hills.Gone was the suburban wasteland of Glendale and the trashy mini-mall sprawl of Mid-City.
Gone was the relentless existential hum of the freeway, the racial blight of the LAPD, the handsome lying face of O.J.Simpson and the blank, bewildered face of his murdered wife, Nicole.
Gone was the banally evil face of Mark Fuhrman and the nihilistic cokehead teens of Less than Zero.Gone were the Menéndez brothers and the white vigilante Michael Douglas played in Falling Down.Movies over the years had depicted Los Angeles and its outskirts as a kind of dystopian futuristic hellscape—a clarion warning for the rest of the w...