Danzy Senna's You Are Free is now available for the first time in audio!
Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they'd applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities-and envies- the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.
Audiobook Table of Contents:
Admission, read by Adenrele Ojo
The Land of Beulah, read by January LaVoy
Replacement Theory, read by Cassandra Campbell
There, There, read by Bahni Turpin
The Care of the Self, read by January LaVoy
You Are Free, read by Cassandra Campbell
Triptych, read by Adenrele Ojo
What's the Matter with Helga and Dave?, read by Bahni Turpin
From the bestselling author of Caucasia, 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.
The 1968 marriage of Danzy Senna's parents, a white woman with Boston blueblood lineage and the son of a struggling black single mother, was a metaphor of a hopeful era. Both were writers and activists in the civil-rights movement. But the marriage was followed eight years later by one of the ugliest divorces in Boston's history. Decades later, Senna looks back at the opposing American histories that her parents had tried so hard to overcome. In the process, she reconstructs a long-buried family mystery that illuminates her own childhood and helps her to understand her enigmatic father, the power and failure of her parents' union, and, finally, the forces of history.
"Senna's dynamic storytelling illuminates personal revelations that are anything but black and white."-Entertainment Weekly
