New People

smiling, nodding in agreement. The poet looks embarrassed by their praise. He keeps scratching his arm as he stares at the floor. Maria hovers in the background, her fists clenched in her pock-ets. The poet's eyes discover her. You good? he says. She nods, chokes out the lie: I'm good. In her dream that night she is sitting on a blue velvet sofa, reading the pages of a friend's novel. She realizes in the dream that it is a perfect story she is reading. She is miserable that she did not write it. She knows she will never write a book like this. She will never write a work of fiction. She is a scholar; she only works with given materials. She wakes up hot with envy. She has to remind herself that the novel doesn't exist outside of her dream, nor does the friend who wrote it. Khalil is asleep beside her. There is a ticking sound coming from the kitchen. Maria closes her eyes, thinking of the poet. She remembers his face and the way he stood half-turned away from the audience. She remembers, with photographic clarity, the slope of his forehead and the small scar cutting through his eyebrow. Warmth and a kind of preemptive grief move through her body. Khalil looks politely bored in his sleep, as if he's listening to somebody recounting a dream. Maria is twenty-seven. She is engaged to marry Khalil, who loves her unequivocally. She is the one he has been waiting for his whole life. Maria loves Khalil. She never doubts this. He is the one she needs, the one who can repair her. They met in college on the other coast years ago, so they have, in a sense, grown up together. It is sometimes hard for Maria to see where one of them ends and the other begins. Their favorite song is Al Green's "Simply Beautiful." Their favorite movies are Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Chameleon Street, and Nothin' But a Man. Their favorite novel is Giovanni's Room. Khalil says they make each other complete. Their skin is the same shade of beige. Together, they look like the end of a story. They li

quickly liquefies into absurd horror. New Yorker

Danzy Senna delivers her finest and funniest work yet [she] writes with a dexterous command of character and language. And she unleashes a razor-sharp sense of humor that take aim at and slices through notions of political correctness, identity politics and hypocrisy achingly funny...and deeply affecting." Essence

A darkly comic novel about race, about false utopias, and about the fine line between seemingly innocuous, everyday groupthink the kind that s the price of admission for being part of a marriage, or a band of friends, or a tribe of any sort.... Senna writes beautifully about the complexity of identity, the intersection of racial consciousness, and class awareness, and individual perspective. . . Everyone should read it. Vogue

Senna s thriller-like novel is a stirring exploration of race and identity, and, a propulsive look at a fantasy playing out before one s eyes. Esquire

Compulsively readable. Buzzfeed Books
 
It says a great deal for New People Danzy Senna s martini-dry, espresso-dark comedy of contemporary manners that its compound of caustic observations and shrewd characterizations could only have emerged from a writer as finely tuned to her social milieu as [Jane] Austen was to hers artfully strewn with excruciating and uproarious misperceptions [New People] doesn t pour cold water on one s expectations for a better, more tolerant world. In fact, it implies that world has, to a great extent, already arrived. Newsday

Set in the Rodney King-era 90s, New People is as mesmerizingly fast-paced as it is deeply reflective of monumental truths that resonate perhaps even more powerfully two decades in the future. Harper s Bazaar 

The thorniness of desire is inextricably intertwined here with the fraught history of race in America, and, as in Senna s previous work, she aims to satirize characterizations of racial identity at every turn Maria s deliberate refusal to embrace a more hopeful future keeps eating away at her, leaving her in a potentially ruinous fix by the end of her unresolved story. And yet that refusal and this novel is also an antidote to the attempt to dismiss continuing racial inequalities within a narrative of progress. Yes, right now, it s knotty, and uncomfortable, and depressing. And we must not look away. San Francisco Chronicle

A darkly comic psychological thriller Senna s antiheroine is winningly vulnerable... and New People is at its best when it delves into the worlds of Maria s construction, or reconstruction [she] wanders the city in a daze, ricocheting from bad decision to bad decision, barely dreaming at all. Her life seems like it will never make room for the answers she seeks, and Senna enjoys every second she takes to make that clear. Village Voice

A provocative conversation starter...with bite and brains invigorating. Paste Magazine

Sharp. Boston Globe

"The frankness with which New People treats race as a kind of public performance is both uncomfortable and strangely cathartic. ... Provocative." Wall Street Journal

Agile and ambitious... a wild-hearted romance about secrets and obsessions, a dramedy of manners about educated middle-class blacks the talented tenth that is Senna s authorial home ground. Elle

A paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially mixed The novel s ultimate message seems...to be one both true and unsettling, if unsurprising: that color-lines have never left America and likely never will. Los Angeles Review of Books

Oooooo, this book! Senna has created an engrossing story of race and class in contemporary America It s fantastic! You can practically hear it sizzle in your hands. BookRiot

A thoughtful, earnest, witty discussion on race. Marie Claire

A brilliant, thoughtful treatise on race and identity in the 21st century. Pop Sugar

[A] taut novel about a couple grappling with guilt, race, and desire in the late 90s. Esquire

Compellingly provocative [Senna] creat[es] a dense psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the 20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive." New Republic

Senna s meditation on 1996 America and its false sense of progress is an eerie picture of society today, too. With a dark sense of humor, Senna builds her story with a horror-like tension that releases with a tongue-in-cheek sigh. Sure to keep readers riding white-knuckled to the end. Booklist

Danzy Senna s latest stunner of a novel is both political and bingeable, worthy of a one-sitting read   Vulture

Provocative Expertly plotted and full of dark humor, New People is a thoughtful and unforgettable look at race and class at the dawn of the 21st century. BookPage

Danzy Senna s latest novel is the best of her writing. It s rich, nuanced, and in some respects, scary. The question at its core is: What happens when your perfect life isn t enough? Bitch

A striking, off-kilter exploration of race and class. Huffington Post

[New People] will catch readers off guard with its plot twists and almost too-relatable characters. Senna uses light humor to balance disturbing events that present Maria with more than a few reality checks. Ms. Magazine

New People will challenge your assumptions about how you define yourself and others.
HelloGiggles

An achievement in so many ways. It succeeds, to begin with, in capturing the psyche of a woman worn down by expectation. It also convincingly distills the essence of an intentional community in bohemian black Brooklyn. And it manages to send up the literary tropes of biracial representation, in particular that of the tragic mulatto, a mixed-race person who s traumatized by their inability to fit neatly into distinct racial categories and their attendant social schema. Senna plugs that legendary trope into the classic humor machine. With New People, Senna appears to have written the book she was waiting for. The Baffler

An absolutely brilliant darkly comic wild ride of a novel it s completely fearless and subversive while at the same time incredibly honest and accurate in how it approaches race and class. Porochista Khakpour, LitHub

A darkly comic page-turner. Los Angeles Daily News

A lively, biting novel about the heavy burdens of racial self-consciousness and the perils of an identity forged by the assumptions of others. 1843 Magazine

"Senna s latest novel, New People, occupies the uneasy space between horror and humor.
Vineyard Gazette

One of the very most interesting social writers the 21st century has yet to produce...Senna explodes American conceptions of class and race in ways that will make readers completely uncomfortable. Seattle Weekly

"A great read, both compelling and thoughtful. The narrative has a page-turning urgency, as Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her own making. Library Journal (starred)

Senna's fearless novel is equal parts beguiling and disturbing [she] combines the clued-in status details you'd find in a New York magazine article with the narrative invention of big-league fiction . Every detail and subplot is resonant. A great book about race and a great book all around. Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Remarkable. New People plays out like Greek tragedy and social comedy all at once, reminding you that the worst kind of hell is always the one we raise. Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

New People sparkles with precision, and with antic and merciless hilarity. I was seduced into reading it in one sitting, but will be thinking about it for a long time to come. This book utterly grave, and yet beautifully light-hearted--is a wonder. 
Rachel Kushner, author of The Flame Throwers

"I stayed up way later than planned to finish New People, Danzy Senna s riveting, take-no-prisoners, dystopic dream of a novel. More scorcher than satire, New People loads identity, race, despair, and desire into a blender then hits high. Get ready to stay up late, to be propelled, pricked, and haunted." 
Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

"Danzy Senna detonates the bomb between respectability and desire. In hypnotizing prose, New People kicks you in the gut, then sings you a lullaby. Read this and be haunted. Senna is a master."
Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day