For more information or to order books, please visit: https://www.brazosbookstore.com/event/inprint-reading-series-rumaan-alam-and-danzy-senna
Rumaan Alam and Danzy Senna will read from their new novels Entitlement and Colored Television, followed by an on-stage conversation with Pushcart Prize winning author of the novel BANG! and a forthcoming essay collection, Daniel Peña. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing.
Rumaan Alam’s New York Times bestselling novel Leave the World Behind was a finalist for the National Book Award, one of President Barack Obama’s Summer Reads, and was made into a feature film starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke. Roxanne Gay calls it “an exceptional examination of race and class and what the world looks like when it’s ending—not at all different from the world we are in now.” His other novels include Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother. Alam joins us to read from and talk about his new novel Entitlement. Set in the mid-2010’s New York, a young woman is hired to assist an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune. Charles Yu writes, “Reading Entitlement felt like having a vise slowly tightened around my heart…. Elegant, precise, and devastating.” A starred Kirkus review says the novel “cements Alam’s status as a talented truthteller willing to tackle tough issues with grace, generosity, and sensitivity.”
Danzy Senna’s bestselling debut novel, Caucasia, which James McBride called “lucid and magnificent,” won the Stephen Crane Award for Best New Fiction. She is the recipient of numerous other awards, and her novel New People was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and Time Magazine. She is also author of a short story collection and a memoir. Senna joins us with her highly anticipated new novel Colored Television, a portrait of a writer who sets out to complete her magnum opus, what her artist husband nicknames her “mulatto War and Peace.” When the book doesn’t launch her and her young family into the lap of Los Angeles luxury, she turns her sights to Hollywood. “Addictive, hilarious and relatable, yes,” writes Miranda July, “but Colored Television is after something larger and more elusive, a very modern reckoning with the ambiguities triangulated by race, class, creativity, and love.” She nails it.”
Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor at the University of North Texas. Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar and previous to his move to Dallas he lived in Houston where he taught creative writing. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Rumpus, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among other venues. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Público Press and his debut collection of essays is forthcoming from One World/Penguin Random House.