Mark Smith, is a sensitive thirty-seven-year-old environmental scientist of mixed race. He tries to come to terms with his mother’s painful death as he goes through the stages of grief. Mark is also reassessing his relationship with his gay twin sister, Maria, a lawyer. After several failed relationships with women in college, Mark, while at his mother’s funeral in Chicago, reconnects with his high school girlfriend, Christy, an artist who paints only self-portraits. He now believes he has finally found true and lasting love, but trouble is brewing. Pulling focus on the cumulative unease and random violence that has gripped American life in recent years, The Glint of Light proves why Clarence Major is one of America’s most beloved novelists.

CLARENCE MAJOR is a novelist, poet and painter. His novels include ‘Dirty Bird Blues’ (a Penguin Classic), ‘Such Was the Season’, a Literary Guild selection; ‘My Amputations’, winner of the Western States Book Award; ‘Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar’, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and other novels. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals. Major has been awarded a 2016 PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award, a 2015 “Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts” by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Council on the Arts Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Award finalist. He was elected to The Georgia State Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis.

Clarence Major's profile page

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