Reginald McKnight is a short story writer and novelist. He has won the O. Henry Award, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and many other awards and prizes for his work. In addition to writing, McKnight has been a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Maryland, College Park, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently the Hamilton Holmes Professor of English at the University of Georgia in Athens. He is the author of He Sleeps (2002), White Boys (1999), The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas (1992), I Get on the Bus (1990), and Moustapha’s Eclipse (1988).
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The Kind of Light That Shines on TexasStoriesFrom"The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas"
The light made my skin look orange, and I started thinking about what Wickham had told us about light. She said that oranges and apples, leaves and flowers, the whole multicolored world, was not what it appeared to be. The colors we see, she said, look like they do only because of the light or ray that shines on them. “The color of the thing isn’t what you see but the light that’s reflected off it.” Then she shut out the lights and shone a white light on a prism. We watched the pale splay of colors on the projector screen; some people oohed and aahed. Suddenly, she switched on a black light and the color of everything changed. The prism colors vanished, Wickham’s arms were purple, the buttons of her dress were as orange as hot coals, rather than the blue they had been only seconds before. We were all very quiet. “Nothing,” she said, after a while, “is really what it appears to be.”
The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas:Stories -
The Kind of Light That Shines on TexasStoriesFrom"Roscoe in Hell"
Danita miscarried. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know what a miscarriage was till then. I mean I’d heard the word before, but I really didn’t know what it was. And I didn’t know it would make me feel so bad either. I felt bad ‘cause for a whole month I’d been thinking about what it’d be like to be a pop.
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The Kind of Light That Shines on TexasStoriesFrom"Peacetime"
It was a pretty weird time. Little Martinez was dead, and so was Zoot the Boot. Little Martinez got drunk when his fiancée pink-slipped him for some long-haired dude, and so driving on some highway in Texas, drunk like he was, he stopped his car – just like that – got out, and started directing traffic. They say when they found him he’d been run over four or five times. Guy’s head was about as thick as a T-bone steak, they say. And like Zoot had been shot right between the eyes by some gang dude in East L.A. Zoot’d gone home for the weekend. Corporal Ski and PFC Mike O.D.’d on angel dust. Lopez was dead and Forehead was dead. Car wreck. Bob the Hick was dead. Wife capped his ass with his forty-five. Sergeant Eyeball was dead. Suicide. Got busted to PFC for stealing a guy’s radio. Couldn’t hack the pay cut, I guess. Anyway, all these dudes were dead as fuck.
The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas:Stories
"A sly, deep, perverse study of black middle-class alienation . . . Subtle and beautifully tuned. McKnight has fused poetic structure with the suspense thriller." —The New York Times Book Review [on He Sleeps]
"McKnight is a true cartographer of our inner lives, mapping our hearts and souls, our spirits and dreams with lyricism that many artists aspire to but few achieve." —Rohan B. Preston, The Washington Post Book World [on White Boys]
“Time and again McKnight's stories slyly combine a faith in human potential with a tidy and compelling fatalism. The combination makes for a stunning set of stories and reminds us that if ours are the choices, then ours too are the consequences. As a character in the story ‘Soul Food’ puts it, ‘If the universe expands and contracts over aeons, so can human consciousness.’” —People [on The Kind of Light That Shines in Texas]
Selected Works
