[Crwt-undergrad-info] Fwd: Announcing the Special Guest for ‘The Other Americans’

Tue Mar 19 09:31:09 PDT 2024

From: California Book Club <info at californiabookclub.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 19, 2024 at 6:02 AM
Subject: Announcing the Special Guest for ‘The Other Americans’
To: <allisonh at ucr.edu>

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Announcing the Special Guest for ‘The Other Americans’
In this newsletter, we announce that Danzy Senna will be the special guest
to discuss Laila Lalami’s novel, the March California Book Club selection,
with Lalami and guest host David L. Ulin.
[image: ZYZYYVZ magazine]

*By ANITA FELICELLI*

We’re delighted to welcome Danzy Senna, author of five critically acclaimed
books and another novel, *Colored Television*
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MTYmZD1uNG4xZDly.jZQ30fBVinD4_Zf1TRu1luE5vWPDdEssvlTwQA7l-es>,
on the way this summer, as our special guest for a conversation about the
March California Book Club selection, *The Other Americans*
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MTcmZD12MHI0ejRr.kUfK2SpfWC1AkuebEidaZQNp6PlX-ZMDZhBvqTUZ3C4>,
with its author, Laila Lalami, and *Alta Journal* books editor and guest
host David L. Ulin.

Senna’s books move back and forth among California, New York, and
Massachusetts. Her involving, honest, and characteristically unsentimental
memoir, *Where Did You Sleep Last Night?*
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MTgmZD12NGU5cDd0.F5QuOoNft5r77PTaQjn1MSosIXeJPTHRJios2kUnTR4>,
came out in 2009, after two of her novels. Like many authors’ memoirs, it
seems to give clues to recurring elements within her fiction, torqued and
scrambled and pulled off their hinges—it’s work that is frequently
startling, sometimes sliding into bleak comedy, eschewing mushiness, and
always elegantly precise. Senna’s memoir looks at race in America by
unfolding the story of her own parents’ troubled mixed-race marriage; the
secrets in the undocumented past of her father, Black author and editor
Carl Senna, involving his own father, a Mexican boxer whom he never knew,
contrast with the meticulously documented past of her mother, poet Fanny
Howe, descended from Boston Brahmins, whose lineage dated to the *Mayflower*
.

*Caucasia*
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MTkmZD1jMHMyZDFu.c6frXdL_O6CHDK94riqY0onoCcv1Htx1RjditM9LE14>,
Senna’s superb debut novel, was published in early 1998, just two years
after voters approved a highly controversial proposition to ban affirmative
action on California public-university campuses—student protesters at UC
Berkeley and UC Riverside called for schools to resist the guidelines. It
immediately became one of my favorite contemporary novels. The book is set
in ’70s Boston, during the earlier, well-known social and political tumult
of the civil rights movement, among activists and intellectuals, and
features biracial sisters, born to a Black father and a white mother
involved in that movement, who find themselves aligned with different
parents along color lines, though as one sister puts it, “before I ever saw
myself, I saw my sister. When I was still too small for mirrors, I saw her
as the reflection that proved my own existence. Back then, I was content to
see only Cole, three years older than me, and imagine that her
face—cinnamon-skinned, curly-haired, serious—was my own.” While the
sisters’ parents’ union had a sense of symbolic triumph, their childhood is
marked by violence, and they follow different paths. As *The Other
Americans*
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MjAmZD1xNGQ0dzVm.mF-vUKQkPzCe9SrkqvRXKMn0KWHlAJ7m9AAy7dqgzaM>
does, this novel employs an epiphanic structure and the techniques of
realism, offering readers not only a good story but a canny portrait of a
specific historical time as well as the people who populated it.

Subsequent novels by Senna play with some of the same elements—biracial
girls and women, doubling, racial performance—but they grow increasingly
provocative and edgily funny over a period of years, elucidating some
differences in contemporary East Coast and West Coast culture. Lesser known
but immediately fascinating to me in 2004, when it came out, for its
Highsmithian qualities, and unexpectedly haunting me ever since, Senna’s
*Symptomatic* operates as a tense, disturbing psychological novel of
obsession. It may have its origins in some of the same compelling material
to be found in *Caucasia*, but it turns elements from that book upside down
and wilds them—in its pages are references to “new people,” mixed people,
as opposed to people categorized by old strictures, and the term becomes
the title of a later Senna novel that pushes boundaries further. In
*Symptomatic*, a young, reserved biracial woman with ambiguous coloring
moves from California to New York City for a magazine-writing fellowship
and becomes acquainted with a fact-checker at the job, an older woman with
similar, hard-to-racially-locate skin color who is eager to befriend her.

*New People*, Senna’s most recently published novel, which is thrillingly
unsettling, goes several steps further as a razor-sharp, subversive, and
highly original comedy about a light-skinned Black woman with issues, and
when I politely call them *issues*, I’m understating—the protagonist is
obsessed with her fiancé’s poet friend, and that isn’t the only hidden
betrayal in their history. Set in the ’90s, the book follows as she and her
fiancé come out of the campus politics of a slightly earlier era; they are
the “new people” of the title, and you can feel in this book a kinship to
Fran Ross’s classic satire *Oreo*
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.

Senna’s forthcoming novel, which I read in galley form, is the sharply
funny, satiric *Colored Television*. The plot revolves around Jane, a
biracial novelist who’s been working on a historical opus for 10 years,
only to have her editor, to her shock, reject it. She and her husband and
two children move into her old friend’s house while he’s away—the friend, a
television writer, is also biracial. While the plot of *Colored Television*
has more straightforwardness than *Symptomatic* or *New People*, it carries
forward Senna’s strong sense of doubling, her interest in racial
performance, in taking on identities and adopting lives that don’t belong
to you, and intriguingly, her interest in doubleness ripples out from the
protagonist to other characters. While Senna’s books bounce between the
East Coast and California, this one is her most Los Angeles–oriented work
yet—we can’t wait to see it in the world.

As you gear up for Thursday’s conversation, consider picking up another of
Lalami’s striking books (you can read about them in this essay
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MjImZD1nMG05aDhl.w_zeivcsDPYnTqEWFjPMKhGG2H1eLiOve7TZ4XNasuU>
by author and critic Ilana Masad) and one of Senna’s, too.

*Join us on March 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Lalami will appear in
conversation with Senna and *Alta Journal* books editor and guest
California Book Club host David L. Ulin to discuss *The Other Americans
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MjMmZD1sOG8zaDBi.Im8QEArGCBGyhnFuC4gNoxxBILY3_UerpvUYpmFdtaY>.
*Register for the Zoom conversation **here*
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.

REGISTER FOR ZOOM EVENT
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ROAD TRIP AS ARTIFACT

Author Claire Vaye Watkins (*I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness*
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writes a distinctive and memorable meditation on the Morongo Basin, where
she’s lived off and on for the past four years. —*Alta*
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SWEET SCIENCE

CBC editor Anita Felicelli profiles Bay Area author Rita Bullwinkel, author
of the “soulful and virtuosic” novel *Headshot*
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MzEmZD1lNWMwaTZk.vUnMX6c16toyF4xRW8_CI7pXh-wrp1N0f_LfuiaCCus>,
which features the eight best girl boxers gathering in a Daughters of
America Cup tournament in Reno. —*Alta
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IMPROMPTU REUNION

Read author Dagoberto Gilb’s short story “Prima.” —*Alta*
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2023 GOLDEN STATE BOOKS

The Commonwealth Club announced the finalists for the California Book
Awards. These include Dave Eggers and Shawn Harris’s *The Eyes and the
Impossible
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MzYmZD1jM3UwejZ2.bWXknIcEWxxKoUOPw2AQZTTFZbDCTtzASqFrxKA0MX0>*,
Shanthi Sekaran’s *Boomi’s Boombox
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MzcmZD10OGMyeTJl.PByYtYdR2YqOYykTcp15MSyc33DnxnfxAsT7ZDWeBQc>*,
and Justin Torres’s *Blackouts
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1MzgmZD1rMGswcDR5.CuPgqnkpIFAsXYN_erO2HgQm_ea6q9ZtOisy-hAlxnk>*.
—Commonwealth Club
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LANGUAGE AS TARGET

Author Maya Binyam profiles prior CBC author Percival Everett, whose latest
novel, *James
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1NDImZD12M205bDR5.apN-_7w7G1Vj1dYwijG74E63ky-CCtlABZn-FOj8h7c>*,
reimagines *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn* and is out March 19. —*New
Yorker
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1NDMmZD1mNXk4ZzFj.G65qhj7HMZ4rJzA1Tijc8bzWRv0Z75VmNybbbyXXscQ>*
*
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CONTEMPORARY HUMOR

Several California authors were named to a list of “22 of the Funniest
Novels Since ‘Catch-22*.’” *These include prior CBC authors Paul Beatty and
Percival Everett, as well as Armistead Maupin, Bret Easton Ellis, Tony
Tulathimutte, and Ottessa Moshfegh. *—**New York Times
<https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0yNDM5Mzg1MDI0NDU0MjAzMjQzJmM9bTBmNSZlPTQ3NTMxMyZiPTEyOTc4Nzc1NDYmZD12N2kwYTR2.ctN8lJ1FwVeOGBm9fhXCsvSmwrVnJwQx4UgAhvS8gbc>*
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