The Inside Reader: Fenton Johnson
Jul. 16th, 2010 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reviews_and_ramblingsShow 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.
3) Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Diamond reshapes our understanding of the New World and the role of human beings in shaping it. Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Later Printing edition (April 1, 1999)
Publisher Link: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-31755-8/
ISBN-10: 0393317552
ISBN-13: 978-0393317558
Amazon: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.
4) The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return, by Mircea Eliade. In these two books, which form a pair and ideally would be read together, Eliade describes convincingly how the patterns and myths that underlay so-called “primitive” cultures remain with us today, shaping how we think and act as well as how we understand ourselves and our world. Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (October 23, 1987)
Publisher Link: http://www.hmhbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=1189795
ISBN-10: 015679201X
ISBN-13: 978-0156792011
Amazon: The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion
A noted historian of religion traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times, in terms of space, time, nature and the cosmos, and life itself. Index. Translated by Willard Trask.
Paperback: 232 pages Publisher: Princeton University Press (April 18, 2005)
Publisher Link: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8010.html
ISBN-10: 0691123500
ISBN-13: 978-0691123509
Amazon: The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History
This founding work of the history of religions, first published in English in 1954, secured the North American reputation of the Romanian émigré-scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures and drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return makes both intelligible and compelling the religious expressions and activities of a wide variety of archaic and "primitive" religious cultures. While acknowledging that a return to the "archaic" is no longer possible, Eliade passionately insists on the value of understanding this view in order to enrich our contemporary imagination of what it is to be human. Jonathan Z. Smith's new introduction provides the contextual background to the book and presents a critical outline of Eliade's argument in a way that encourages readers to engage in an informed conversation with this classic text.
5) American Architecture and Urbanism, by Vincent Scully. This book taught me, a country boy, how to see the city and most particularly its architecture as the embodiment of economic, political, and social forces and, for better and worse, as the apotheosis of desire. Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company; Revised edition (July 1988)
ISBN-10: 0805008136
ISBN-13: 978-0805008135
Amazon: American Architecture and Urbanism
6) Letters on Cézanne and Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Marie Rilke. All writers should read these profound, eloquent meditations on what it means to encounter and make art. Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: North Point Press; 2nd edition (September 15, 2002)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/lettersoncezanne
ISBN-10: 086547639X
ISBN-13: 978-0865476394
Amazon: Letters on Cézanne
Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching art. For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes.Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life. Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cezanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cezanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.
Paperback: 76 pages Publisher: BN Publishing (May 4, 2009)
ISBN-10: 1607960265
ISBN-13: 978-1607960263
Amazon: Letters to a Young Poet
Every page is stamped with Rilke's characteristic grace, and the book is free of the breathless effect that occasionally mars his poetry. His ideas on gender and the role of the artist are also surprisingly prescient. And even his retrograde comment on the "beauty of the virgin" (which the poet derives from the fact that she "has not yet achieved anything") is counterbalanced by his perception that "the sexes are more related than we think." Those looking for an alluring image of the solitary artist--and for an astonishing quotient of wisdom--will find both in Letters to a Young Poet.
7) Myths and Symbols of Indian Civilization, by Heinrich Zimmer with Ananada Coomaraswamy. This book is the best means I know to that unattainable goal of understanding India. Paperback: 282 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (May 1, 1972)
Publisher Link: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/2278.html
ISBN-10: 0691017786
ISBN-13: 978-0691017785
Amazon: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization
This book interprets for the Western mind the key motifs of India's legend, myth, and folklore, taken directly from the Sanskrit, and illustrated with seventy plates of Indian art. It is primarily an introduction to image-thinking and picture-reading in Indian art and thought, and it seeks to make the profound Hindu and Buddhist intuitions of the riddles of life and death recognizable not merely as Oriental but as universal elements.
8) Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Morrison has said that she writes fiction to give voices to those who had none. In Beloved the slaves of the South have a too-brief moment to tell their stories. Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage (June 8, 2004)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400033416
ISBN-10: 1400033411
ISBN-13: 978-1400033416
Amazon: Beloved
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.
9) Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. “How hard it is to write simple,” Flaubert wrote. All of the power and tragedy of human desire are here, in one woman’s short life and brutal death. Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Signet Classics (November 5, 2001)
Publisher Link: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780451528209,00.html
ISBN-10: 0451528204
ISBN-13: 978-0451528209
Amazon: Madame Bovary
Set amid the stifling atmosphere of nineteenth-century bourgeois France, Madame Bovary is at once an unsparing depiction of a woman’s gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human shallowness and stupidity. Neither Emma, nor her lovers, nor Homais, the man of science, escapes the author’s searing castigation; and it is the book’s final profound irony that only Charles, Emma’s oxlike, eternally deceived husband, emerges with a measure of human grace through his stubborn and selfless love. With its rare formal perfection, Madame Bovary represents, as Frank O’Connor has declared, “possibly the most beautifully written book ever composed; undoubtedly the most beautifully written novel…a book that invites superlatives…the most important novel of the century.”
10) Middlemarch, by George Eliot. Who was it that said, “Middlemarch is only novel written for intelligent people”? I don’t buy that comment, but the fact remains that Eliot, a superb philosopher as well as novelist, does a masterful job of seamlessly merging the two disciplines. Paperback: 904 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Reissue edition (September 1, 2008)
Publisher Link: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199536757.do?keyword=Middlemarch&sortby=bestMatches
ISBN-10: 0199536759
ISBN-13: 978-0199536757
Amazon: Middlemarch
Writing at the very moment when the foundations of Western thought were being challenged and undermined, George Eliot fashions in Middlemarch (1871-2) the quintessential Victorian novel, a concept of life and society free from the dogma of the past yet able to confront the scepticism that was taking over the age. In a panoramic sweep of English life during thr years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Eliot explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but näive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw: and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel's rich comic vein. Felicia Bonaparte has provided a new Introduction for this updated edition, the text of which is taken from David Carroll's Clarendon Middlemarch (1986), the first critical edition.
11) Mystery and Manners and The Collected Short Stories, by Flannery O’Connor. I grew up Catholic in the South. O’Connor’s stories enlightened me about that very odd and particular destiny. Latin America begins at the Ohio River, a fact that O’Connor’s stories make clear. Mystery and Manners is one of the very few genuinely useful books on how to write. Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (January 1, 1969)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/mysteryandmanners
ISBN-10: 0374508046
ISBN-13: 978-0374508043
Amazon: Mystery and Manners
At her death in 1964, O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her too-short lifetime. The keen writings comprisingMystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the directness and simplicity of the author's style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith. The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. Also included are: three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two pieces on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the 8th Grade"; and four articles concerning the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South." Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are widely seen as gems. This bold and brilliant essay-collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of contemporary American literature.
Hardcover: 1300 pages Publisher: Library of America; First Printing edition (September 1, 1988)
Publisher Link: http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=105
ISBN-10: 0940450372
ISBN-13: 978-0940450370
Amazon: Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works
Flannery O'Connor, a unique and important figure in the Southern literary tradition, was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. This volume, containing her two novels, short stories, essays and letters, is the only complete collection of her works.
12) Recollected Essays, by Wendell Berry. Plato tells us that the only place for the philosopher in the city is at the head of it. Berry is or ought to be that person. Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: North Point Press (September 1983)
ISBN-10: 086547026X
ISBN-13: 978-0865470262
Amazon: Recollected Essays
These eleven essays, selected by the author from five previous collections, provide us with a single volume tracing Mr. Berry's desire "to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place." Essays are drawn from The Long-Legged House, The Hidden Wound, The Unforeseen Wilderness, A Continuous Harmony, and The Unsettling of America. A new essay, "The Making of a Marginal Farm," forms the coda, unifying "what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households."
13) The Stories of Anton Chekhov. Chekhov is the master before whose compassion and generosity of spirit we all bow. Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: Bantam (October 31, 2000)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780553381009
ISBN-10: 0553381008
ISBN-13: 978-0553381009
Amazon: Stories of Anton Chekhov
Called the greatest of short story writer, Anton Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressionistic depictions of Russian life and the human condition. Now, thirty of his best tales from the major periods of his creative life are available in this outstanding one volume edition. Included are Chekhov's characteristically brief, evocative early pieces such as "The Huntsman" from 1885, which brilliantly conveys the complex texture of two lives during a meeting on a summer's day. Four years later, Chekhov produced the tour de force "A Boring Story" (1889), the penetrating and caustic self-analysis of a dying professor of medicine. Dark irony, social commentary, and symbolism mark the stories that follow, particularly "Ward No. 6" (1892), where the tables turn on the director of a mental hospital and make him an inmate. Here, too, is one of Chekhov's best -known stories. "The Lady with the Little Dog" (1899), a look at illicit love, as well as his own favorite among his stories, "The Student," a moving piece about the importance of religious tradition. Atmospheric, compassionate, and uncannily wise, Chekhov's short fiction possesses the transcendent power of art to awe and change the reader. This monumental edition, expertly translated, is especially faithful to the meaning of Chekhov's prose and the unique rhythms of his writing, giving readers an authentic sense of his style-and, in doing so, a true understanding of his greatness.
14) The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky was marginally crazy but then so is the world. For the faithless: read Dostoyevsky and believe. Paperback: 960 pages
Publisher: Penguin Classics (April 29, 2003)
Publisher Link: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140449242,00.html?strSrchSql=0140449248/The_Brothers_Karamazov_Fyodor_Dostoyevsky
ISBN-10: 0140449248
ISBN-13: 978-0140449242
Amazon: The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue
This novel was Dostoyevsky's last and finest work, telling the story of the four Karamazov brothers—each with his own distinct personality and desires. Driven by intense, uncontrollable emotions of rage and revenge, they all become involved in the brutal murder of their despicable father. Exploring the secret depths of humanity's struggles and sins, Dostoyevsky unfolds a grand epic which attempts to venture into mankind's darkest heart, and grasp the true meaning of existence.
15) Body and Society, by Peter Brown. Among the 20th century’s greatest scholars, Brown traces here how the warring sects and strange cults of the latter days of the Roman Empire shaped how we see the relationship between mind and body, spirit and flesh. Hardcover: 568 pages
Publisher: Columbia University Press; 2nd edition (July 15, 2008)
Publisher Link: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14406-3/the-body-and-society
ISBN-10: 0231144067
ISBN-13: 978-0231144063
Amazon: The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity
First published in 1988, Peter Brown's The Body and Society was a groundbreaking study of the marriage and sexual practices of early Christians in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Brown focuses on the practice of permanent sexual renunciation-continence, celibacy, and lifelong virginity-in Christian circles from the first to the fifth centuries A.D. and traces early Christians' preoccupations with sexuality and the body in the work of the period's great writers. The Body and Society questions how theological views on sexuality and the human body both mirrored and shaped relationships between men and women, Roman aristocracy and slaves, and the married and the celibate. Brown discusses Tertullian, Valentinus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Constantine, the Desert Fathers, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, among others, and considers asceticism and society in the Eastern Empire, martyrdom and prophecy, gnostic spiritual guidance, promiscuity among the men and women of the church, monks and marriage in Egypt, the ascetic life of women in fourth-century Jerusalem, and the body and society in the early Middle Ages. In his new introduction, Brown reflects on his work's reception in the scholarly community.
16) The Bible, especially: Genesis; Exodus; Isaiah; Kings; Amos; Daniel; the Gospels; and yes, the Letters of Paul, with all their forgeries and imperfections. Enough said.
Hardcover: 1088 pages
Publisher: Crossway Bibles (December 17, 2003)
Publisher Link: http://www.crossway.org/product/1581345968
ISBN-10: 1581345968
ISBN-13: 978-1581345964
Amazon: The Holy Bible
17) Son of the Morning Star, Evan Connell. I had no particular interest in General Custer or the Battle of the Little Big Horn, but this book taught me not just about their historical importance -- any writer could do that -- but how we build history as a tissue of fictions to explain life after the fact. Only a very fine novelist could write history so well. Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: North Point Press (October 30, 1997)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/sonofthemorningstar
ISBN-10: 0865475105
ISBN-13: 978-0865475106
Amazon: Son of the Morning Star
Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history--more than one hundred years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as "one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers," wrote what continues to be the most reliable--and compulsively readable--account of the subject. Connell makes good use of his meticulous research and novelist's eye for the story and detail to re-vreate the heroism, foolishness, and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West.
18) Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot. As a discipline philosophy has drifted from its roots -- the word literally means “the study of love and wisdom.” Hadot shows how that happened and how to find our ways back. Paperback: 309 pages
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing (1995)
ISBN-10: 0631180338
Amazon: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault
19) Varieties of Religious Experience, William James. James was the first English-speaking writer to accept that the paths to God are many and varied, and to open his explorations not just to the panoply of Christian sects but to all the religions and philosophies of the world. Paperback: 452 pages
Publisher: Megalodon Entertainment LLC. (September 16, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0980060540
ISBN-13: 978-0980060546
Amazon: The Varieties of Religious Experience
The Varieties of Religious Experience came about as the result of William James's legendary lecture series at The University of Edinburgh. It consisted of 20 Lectures, 2 courses of 10 lectures each. In this series, James examines in detail the nature of religion, expanding on pragmatism in the process. As part of the canon of modern philosophy and psychology, these lectures are both classic and relevant.
20) Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont. What we call love is a cultural phenomenon, however much we deceive ourselves into thinking otherwise. De Rougemont traces its origins in medieval days, with particular emphasis on the Gnostic sects of the Cathars and the chaste passion of the troubadours. Paperback: 392 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press; Revised edition (August 1, 1983)
Publisher Link: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/426.html
ISBN-10: 0691013934
ISBN-13: 978-0691013930
Amazon: Love in the Western World
In this classic work, often described as "The History of the Rise, Decline, and Fall of the Love Affair," Denis de Rougemont explores the psychology of love from the legend of Tristan and Isolde to Hollywood. At the heart of his ever-relevant inquiry is the inescapable conflict in the West between marriage and passion--the first associated with social and religious responsiblity and the second with anarchic, unappeasable love as celebrated by the troubadours of medieval Provence. These early poets, according to de Rougemont, spoke the words of an Eros-centered theology, and it was through this "heresy" that a European vocabulary of mysticism flourished and that Western literature took on a new direction. Bringing together historical, religious, philosophical, and cultural dimensions, the author traces the evolution of Western romantic love from its literary beginnings as an awe-inspiring secret to its commercialization in the cinema. He seeks to restore the myth of love to its original integrity and concludes with a philosophical perspective on modern marriage.
21) Any of James Baldwin -- The Price of the Ticket, his collected essays, are especially fine -- but start with Giovanni’s Room, the book that taught me that gay people were everywhere and that we had a special gift for understanding love and desire, which is to say life. Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Delta (June 13, 2000)
ISBN-10: 0385334583
ISBN-13: 978-0385334587
Amazon: Giovanni’s Room
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
22) All of Shakespeare, but particularly King Lear, The Tempest, The (underrated) Winter’s Tale. The Winter’s Tale could be a dry run for The Tempest; it’s sloppy and verbose in a way that The Tempest is not, but the same themes appear: the reality of magic in our lives, if only we will have faith; the certainty that all sins will be forgiven and that we will be as one in the promised land. If Willie can believe it, so can I. Paperback: 206 pages
Publisher: Nabu Press (February 4, 2010)
ISBN-10: 1143744462
ISBN-13: 978-1143744464
Amazon: The Winter's Tale
""The Winter's Tale" is high fantasy, a tale to be told by the fire! The play belongs to the type known as "tragicomedy", but Shakespeare has separated the tragedy from the comedy. The first part has the same kind of tragic development as "Othello"; the second part is pure idyllic comedy. "The Winter's Tale" is a far better play to hear and see than to read; it needs the voice of the actor to give it life." - G.B. Harrison, editor of texts for The Shakespeare Recording Society.
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.
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