New People
By
Danzy Senna
Read by
Kristen Ariza
Release:
08/01/2017
Runtime:
6h 6m
Unabridged
Quantity:
[Senna] explore[s] what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home — and under the skin...Her new novel, the sinister and charming New People, riffs on the themes she’s made her own — with a twist. It’s a novel that reads us. It anticipates, and sidesteps, lazy reading and sentimental expectations… The material is hot but the style stays cool… Senna’s aim is precise and devastating…There is no easy consolation in New People. But in its insistence on being read on its own terms, its commitment to complexity, it does something better than describe freedom. It enacts it.
New York Times
Vogue Pick for Summer
Elle Magazine Pick of Summer Reads
Harper’s Bazaar Pick for Summer
Glamour Magazine Pick for Summer Reading
Esquire Magazine Best Book of the Year So Far
Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, NPR and THE ROOT
"[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
From the bestselling author of Caucasia and Colored Television, 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.
"[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
From the bestselling author of Caucasia and Colored Television, 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.
Release:
2017-08-01
Runtime:
6h 6m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781524776862
Publisher:
Penguin Random House
Praise