The new novel, colored television uses fiction and satire to spotlight sensitive and often difficult realities of American life.

Senior Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to author Dan Zesena for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

I have affection for all the places and people I skewer in the book.

In Dansy Senna's new novel, all manner of contemporary culture is subjected to sometimes brutal scuring.

Hollywood, publishing, class and real estate, most of all, attitudes toward race.

People aren't expecting a comedy about racial identity or about someone failing, you know,

and financial woes and familial problems but the comedy in it has a lot of darkness

underneath it and it feels like freedom to me to be able to work in that tone.

Did you have fun writing this book?

I had a lot of fun.

Most of all, I'm making fun of myself or people like me. I'm often writing about people in my world and people like

me who I never see represented. So you know so much of my my work is about putting those people into the light.

From her first book, the 1998 novel,

Caukasia and on, Santa has mined and examined her own world of growing up

by racial in America, the tensions within

her own community and the broader culture.

In colored television, her protagonist is a biracial, struggling writer, wife, and mother named Jane Gibson

who can't finish her epic novel, which her black husband playfully dubs her mulatto war and peace,

and gets drawn into the epically nutty world of

television executives breathlessly seeking the next big thing a biracial

comedy. So you've written a novel in which we have a biracial writer, you, writing about a biracial writer who is writing now a TV series about a biracial writer?

The Hall of Mirrors.

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