Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson's collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson's wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What's the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What's the difference between empiricism and intuition?
The collection draws together essays that originally appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, All Things Considered and elsewhere, along with new work. Johnson reports from the front lines of the AIDS epidemic, from Burning Man, from monasteries near and far. His subject matter ranges from Oscar Wilde to censorship in journalism to Kentucky basketball.
Everywhere Home is the latest title in Sarabande's Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature.
Fenton Johnson is the author of the novels The Man Who Loved Birds, Scissors, Paper, Rock, and Crossing the River, and the nonfiction books Keeping Faith and Geography of the Heart. Johnson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He writes regularly for Harper's, and is a professor in the creative writing programs at the University of Arizona and Spalding University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of 26 essays, the earliest published in 1989, Johnson (The Man Who Loved Birds) contemplates questions of identity, belonging, and belief. With a deft hand and trained ear for storytelling, he explores growing up Catholic in Kentucky, the complex nature of same-gender eros, and the desire to belong. His work is most poignant when he's bearing witness to the plague years of the AIDS crisis and its effects on the social and artistic networks of so many LGBTQ people. In the collection's most moving pieces, he reckons with grief after his lover dies of AIDS-related complications. "From understanding grows compassion; from compassion grows real, enduring, life-affirming change," writes Johnson. These essays trust in the power of communication to build the capacity for change.
