Search results for ""Author Clarence Major""

In the first volume to collect the paintings and drawings of Clarence Major, readers are offered six decades of unique, colorful, and compelling canvases and works on paper-works of singular beauty and social relevance. These works represent Major's personal painterly journey of passionate commitment to art. This generous selection of more than 150 paintings and drawings shows us the melding of rich ideas and fertile images, the braiding of imagination and motif. With their pleasing arrangement of elements, the works come vividly to life. Major often juxtaposes a decorative scheme with his own unique choice of color combinations, reinforced with rigorous brushstrokes that release chromatic energy. The paintings complement and challenge the great traditions of Realism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. Major is primarily a figurative and landscape painter. Here we find landscapes of singular vitality, rich in color and design, dramatic landscapes, and cityscapes representing, among other things, Major's extensive travels in America and Europe. We are also treated to Major's signature figurative work. In these paintings, he ventures fearlessly into familiar yet unexpected areas of richness. Also included is an introductory essay, ""The Education of a Painter,"" written by the artist, which further sheds light on and helps to lay a biographical, social, and historical foundation for this essential volume, reflecting a lifetime of serious commitment to painting at its best.

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Clarence Major is one of America's literary masters. He has published numerous books, from novels to poetry and short story collections. Among his many accolades, he was a finalist for the National Book Award and a Fulbright scholar and received the PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award. His work has been featured in many literary journals, newspapers, and magazines, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Ploughshares.Whether you've known Major's work for decades or are new to his singular style, The Essential Clarence Major offers a thrilling overview of an exceptional career, from his early groundbreaking fiction to his most recent poems. Included here are excerpts from Major's best novels, a selection of his finest short stories and poetry, more than a dozen thought-provoking essays, a taste of his autobiography. Award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Kia Corthron introduces the collection, artfully illuminating Major's importance as one of the foremost and original voices in contemporary American literature.

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A pulsating, powerful tale of the blues, from one of the great American writers of the twentieth centuryIt is Chicago in the 1950s and Manfred Banks has the Dirty Bird Blues. A musician and a blue-collar worker, he feels hard the tug of his two responsibilities: those to his wife and child, and those to rhythm and rhyme, to the lyrics that groove a hollow in his mind. Beneath both is the awful grinding racism Manfred meets on streets each day; that which plucks opportunity from his grasp; that which keeps him wandering in search of fresh starts. And so, in want of easy answers, he turns to the 'Dirty Bird': Old Crow brand whiskey.One of Clarence Major's most influential novels, Dirty Bird Blues is both an extraordinary portrayal of twentieth-century Black reality, and an ode to the richness and power of the blues.

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