PRAISE
“In the course of a prolific seven-decade career, Clarence Major has moved lightly and repeatedly from poetry and painting to fiction and lexicography, criticism and teaching. Flowing through his oeuvre are a playful passion for aesthetic experimentation and an earnest commitment to chronicling the Black experience in the US… The Lurking Place concerns the tribulations of James Eric Lowell, a twenty-five-year-old poet clearly modelled on the author. It is 1968 and James is full of ambition. He wants to have a book published, obtain a lectureship, and earn a seat at the table of American letters. Major writes with great tenderness about the struggle for recognition that engulfs the life of every young artist, the sleepless nights and restless days spent wondering if that big break will ever come.”
—Theo Zenou, The Times Literary Supplement (read full article, “An Artist Of Life: Late Works from a Matster of the Cutting Edge”)
“The Lurking Place is a tender and compelling portrait of the poet as a young man. Clarence Major depicts the convergence of art and love with authority and great charm.”
—HILMA WOLITZER, author of An Available Man: A Novel
“The Lurking Place is a riveting and remarkable portrait of a young man negotiating the conflicts in poetic ambition, untested talent, maybe-love and routine racism. This tale unfolds through New York and Mexico, in a superb evocation of the late sixties, a time when anything could happen and usually did. A wonderful book.”
—JOAN SILBER, author of Improvement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and other awards
“Veteran writer Clarence Major’s literary career continues full speed. His latest novel,
The Lurking Place, rates among his best, using an experienced, all-seeing eye of character, visual detail, and revealing dialogue. With his unique unerring vision, he has amassed an impressive collection including eleven novels, sixteen volumes of poetry, two books of short stories, and ten works of nonfiction. However, this current work of youth, artistic inspiration, love, and a yen for travel reaches one of his creative peaks.”
—Robert Fleming, African American Literature Book Club (
read full review)
“Clarence Major is a masterful and insightful writer. The Lurking Place is the story of James Eric Lowell, a young black poet and is both witness to and participant int he urgent and turbulent ’60s. Lowell struggles to understand and embrace his own complex nature: creative, romantic, solitary, insecure, literary, and fiercely ambitious. Clarence Major, pulling no punches, has once again written an honest and deeply compelling novel exploring the intricate connections among love, politics, and art.”
—JANICE EIDUS, author of The Year of the Rosens
“Were I to name The Lurking Place haunting the corners of this irresistible novel, I’d only get a chuckle from our guide, James Lowell, poet seer of New York in the Summer of Love, and I don’t want to do that. James would be right. He’s a smart sexy man and his story’s as bullish, heart-stopping, and glad as the women who circle around his circling. It’s also sad and hilarious. Don’t miss it for the world.”
—ABBY FRUCHT, author of Licorice: A Novel
“The Lurking Place might well be the best of Major’s very distinguished body of fiction. Generous, humane, and written with a poet’s touch, it is a work of rare beauty. He is an extraordinary artist.”
—STEVE YARBROUGH, author of The Unmade World: A Novel
“This is a wonderful novel…Clarence Major is an important American writer, and this novel is a rich tribute to the often penniless women and men who made Manhattan the center of the literary world in those heady but difficult days of the late ’60s….Be grateful Major is still creating such enduring stories of our lives.”
—PHILLIP LEE WILLIAMS, author of Far Beyond The Gates
“The Lurking Place…[is] a beautiful, sparely written novel…[a] relevant, masterfully told story…”
—ONA RUSSELL, author of The Natural Selection: An Historical Mystery
“Clarence Major’s fiction has amazed me for years. And now The Lurking Place. This novel captures the late sixties in subtle ways that we seldom read. Major assumes the character of this narrator completely and fully, giving himself at once the narrative distance and the fictive detachment he requires to reader this story with building tension and expectancy. A wonderful addition to an already substantial oeuvre.”
—PERCIVAL EVERETT, author of Erasure and other novels
“Vivid, canny, propulsive, and cool, The Lurking Place, Clarence Major’s endlessly engaging new novel, probes the tensions of two interlocking moments–a young artist testing his creative powers and a young generation declaring its independence. From St. Marks Place to Puerto Vallarta, this novel’s roving Bohemia–with its big cast of fascinating travelers–sharpens our vision of the late 1960s as a time when innocence dallied with the sinister.”
—JOHN BECKMAN, author of The Winter Zoo
