Danzy Senna

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning author DANZY SENNA—author of Caucasia, Symptomatic, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, and You Are Free—for a discussion of her latest book, New People: A Novel.

About New People

From the bestselling author of Caucasia, New People is 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.

Praise

"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