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The Inside Reader: Fenton Johnson
Jul. 16th, 2010 12:29 pmShow me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends - Silas Weir MitchellI have already said it in the past, sometime I think my LiveJournal is really too much a small thing for the honor to host such guests, I'd really like for these stunning lists and wonderful authors to have a wider window, but, well, they decided, for a reason or the other, to allow me the pleasure to have them. I'm deeply honored to host Fenton Johnson, 2 novels and 2 memoirs, and a life he decided to share with readers to heal, teach and remember (he and the readers as well I think).
Greatest Hits
Some books move me so deeply that I rush out and tell friends: You must read this book! I don’t come across such books often enough, but I’ve lived long and read a great deal and a list of those books would cover pages.
But the books I list below accomplished more than that. Each initiated a tectonic shift in how I understand the world and my place in it. After reading them I saw the world in a new and richer light; I understood something new and profound about it and about myself; I changed.
The order in which I present them is only the order in which they occurred to me to jot them down, far from my bookshelves. I do not mean it to imply any hierarchy of value, and I know that there are many omissions, most especially among the poets.
1) Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. Among the greatest of Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius was philosophically a Stoic. His short, judicious thoughts on human psychology and the practice of virtue are superior, even in translation, to any contemporary self-help writing. Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Dover Publications (July 11, 1997)
Publisher Link: http://store.doverpublications.com/048629823x.html
ISBN-10: 048629823X
ISBN-13: 978-0486298238
Amazon: Meditations
Stirring reflections on the human condition from a warrior and emperor provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind and personality of a highly principled Roman of the 2nd century. Recognizing that suffering is at the core of life, he counsels stoic detachment in the face of inevitable pain, loss and death.
2) Consolations of Philosophy, Boethius. Boethius, a sixth-century nobleman unjustly imprisoned (and eventually executed) conducts a series of conversations with Lady Philosophy on the concepts of fairness, justice, and faith. Jesus is never mentioned, but the book is the classic example of the blend of Greek and Christian philosophy that provides the foundation for contemporary Western thought. Paperback: 155 pages
Publisher: Penguin Classics (May 1, 1999)
Publisher Link: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140447804,00.html?strSrchSql=0140447806/The_Consolation_of_Philosophy_Ancius_Boethius
ISBN-10: 0140447806
ISBN-13: 978-0140447804
Amazon: The Consolation of Philosophy
‘Why else does slippery Fortune change
So much, and punishment more fit
For crime oppress the innocent?’
Written in prison before his brutal execution in AD 524, Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy is a conversation between the ailing prisoner and his ‘nurse’ Philosophy, whose instruction restores him to health and brings him to enlightenment. Boethius was an eminent public figure who had risen to great political heights in the court of King Theodoric when he was implicated in conspiracy and condemned to death. Although a Christian, it was to the pagan Greek philosophers that he turned for inspiration following his abrupt fall from grace. With great clarity of thought and philosophical brilliance, Boethius adopted the classical model of the dialogue to debate the vagaries of Fortune, and to explore the nature of happiness, good and evil, fate and free will. Victor Watts’s English translation makes The Consolation of Philosophy accessible to the modern reader while losing nothing of its poetic artistry and breadth of vision. This edition includes an introduction discussing Boethius’s life and writings, a bibliography, glossary and notes.
( books from 3 to 22 )
About Fenton Johnson: Fenton Johnson is the author of two novels, Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock, and two works of nonfiction, Geography of the Heart: A Memoir, and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as Wallace Stegner and James Michener Fellowships in Fiction, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction, and an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship in creative nonfiction.
His writing has received a Kentucky Literary Award and two Lambda Literary Awards for best creative nonfiction, as well as the American Library Association Award for best gay/lesbian nonfiction. He has published short stories, essays, and literary journalism in a wide range of anthologies, literary quarterlies, magazines, and newspapers, among them the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Harper’s Magazine, where he authored two cover essays. He has contributed commentaries to National Public Radio and has written narration for award-winning public television documentaries, among them La Ofrenda: Days of the Dead and Stranger with a Camera, recipient of a Columbia Dupont Award in Journalism.
He has a lifelong commitment to the preservation and advancement of human rights. His essay The Limitless Heart (later incorporated into Geography of the Heart) was the first affirmative portrayal of same-gender relationships to appear in the New York Times (June 23, 1991).
He has a distinguished career as a teacher, and has taught in the graduate creative writing programs at San Francisco State University, Columbia University, New York University, and Sarah Lawrence College. Currently he is associate professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where he is working on a third novel arising from the encounter between a Trappist monk, an immigrant Bengali woman doctor, and a renegade Vietnam veteran marijuana grower. In nonfiction, he is writing a meditation on the role of single people — solitiaries — in a resolutely coupled culture.
Geography Of The Heart by Fenton Johnson Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Scribner (June 1, 1997)
Publisher Link: http://books.simonandschuster.com/GEOGRAPHY-OF-THE-HEART/Fenton-Johnson/9780671009830
ISBN-10: 0671009834
ISBN-13: 978-0671009830
Amazon: Geography Of The Heart
From the author of the award-winning novels Crossing The River and Scissors, Paper, Rock comes a powerful book about the transformative power of love. Fenton Johnson recounts the history of "how I feel in love how I came to be with someone else, how he came to death and how I helped." Johnson interweaves two stories: his own upbringing as the youngest of a Kentucky whiskey maker's nine children, and that of his lover LarD Rose, the only child of German Jews, survivors of the Holocaust.
I hadn’t noticed the trend until this last story, but Jenna Byrnes and Jude Mason like their cop hot and dirty, meaning that, their hero are more the ordinary detectives who want to do their job and go home than some invincible superhero. 
I hadn’t noticed the trend until this last story, but Jenna Byrnes and Jude Mason like their cop hot and dirty, meaning that, their hero are more the ordinary detectives who want to do their job and go home than some invincible superhero.