Fenton Johnson

"A meditation on solitude as a font of creativity and spirituality. Known for his lyrical prose and clear insight, Fenton Johnson explores what it means to be not "single"-meaningless outside of coupledom-but "solitary," able to be alone, inclined to mine the treasures of inner life. Americans tend to celebrate "fortress marriage," turning an equal right into an omnivorous expectation, marginalizing solitaries as odd, even potentially threatening. Johnson taps into an older tradition embodied by Trappist monks near the Kentucky home where he grew up, and by artists and writers including Paul Cézanne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Rod McKuen, Nina Simone, and Bill Cunningham. Johnson includes his parents, who in workshop or garden found places to be alone; married people, too, can be solitaries in spirit. A hybrid of memoir, inspiration, social criticism, and celebration of the lives of great solitary artists, At the Center of All Beauty will resonate with anyone needing a break from the clamor of "society.""--

Solitude and the Creative Life

At the Center of All Beauty

Crystal Wilkinson

From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive. Crystal Wilkinson offers up Opulence and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs, and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love -- and love that's handed down -- can conquer. At once tragic and hopeful, this captivating novel is a story about another time, rendered for our own.

The Birds of Opulence

Geography Of The Heart

Raphael Hardin, a young gay man, returns home to visit his dying father--who disapproves of his son's lifestyle but is unaware that his son may be dying as well--in an attempt to reconcile their relationship before it is too late

Scissors, Paper, Rock

A Little Dreaming

Recounts the author's spiritual journey from the abbey of Gethsemane to the San Francisco Zen Center, during which he explored world religions and considered his role as a faithful skeptic.

A Skeptic's Journey

Keeping Faith

Poignant and affectionate, Geography of the Heart is a moving portrait of Lambda Award winner Fenton Johnson, the son of a Kentucky whiskey brewer, and his fateful lover Larry Rose, who, three years into their intense relationship, died of AIDS. Rose had been upfront about his condition from the start of his relationship with Johnson, and the knowledge left their interactions fraught with the pain of anticipated loss. Though Johnson never contracted the virus himself, Rose’s physical decline haunted him. He had come to depend on Rose for his care and understanding as much as Rose, increasingly fragile as their relationship progresses, depended on him. The vivid, poignant, and wise tribute to his soulmate that Johnson has distilled into The Geography of the Heart is a memoir like no other, a startling story of compassion, perseverance, and the acute wounds that can linger in the shadow of true love.

Along with his siblings, Raphael Hardin left his childhood home in rural Kentucky. Grappling with an AIDS diagnosis, he returns to care for his dying father. Told from the perspectives of Raphael, his family, and their lifelong neighbor, Fenton Johnson's landmark novel reveals the blood struggles and binding loves of a broken family made whole.

Fenton Johnson

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