Fenton Johnson has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Geography of the Heart.
Geography of the Heart
Summary
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 Larry Rose, the only child of German Jews. survivors of the Holocaust.
©1996 Fenton Johnson (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Keeping Faith
Summary
Observing an encounter between Catholic and Buddhist monks in 1996 at the Abbey of Gethsemani, near where he grew up in rural Kentucky, Fenton Johnson found himself unable to make the sign of the cross. His distance from his childhood faith had become so great - he considered himself a rational, skeptical man - that he could not participate in this most basic ritual. Impelled by this troubling experience, Johnson began a search for the meaning of the spiritual life, a journey that took him from Gethsemani to the San Francisco Zen Center, through Buddhism and back to Christianity, from paralyzing doubt to a life-enriching faith. Keeping Faith explores the depths of what it means for a skeptic to have and to keep faith. Johnson grew up with the Trappist monks, but rejected institutionalized religion as an adult. While living as a member of the Gethsemani community and the Zen Center, however, he learned to practice Christian rituals with a new discipline and studied Buddhist meditation, which brought him a new understanding of the deep relationship between sexuality and faith, body and spirit. Changed in profound ways, Johnson ultimately turned back to his childhood faith, now inflected with the accumulated wisdom of his journey. Johnson interweaves memoir, the personal and often shocking stories of Buddhist and Christian monks, and a revealing history of the contemplative life in the West. He offers lay Christians an understanding of the origins and history of their contemplative traditions and provides the groundwork needed to challenge orthodox understandings of spirituality. No matter their backgrounds, listeners will find Keeping Faith a work of great power and immediacy.
©2004 Fenton Johnson (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
At the Center of All Beauty
Summary
A profound meditation on accepting and celebrating one's solitude. Solitude is the inspirational core for many writers, artists, and thinkers. Alone with our thoughts, we can make discoveries that matter not only to us but to others. To be solitary is not only to draw sustenance from being alone, but to know that our ultimate responsibility is not only to our partner or our own offspring, but to a larger community. Fenton Johnson's lyrical prose and searching sensibility explores what it means to choose to be solitary and celebrates the notion that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling. He delves into the lives and works of nearly a dozen iconic "solitaries" he considers his kindred spirits, from Thoreau at Walden Pond and Emily Dickinson in Amherst, to Bill Cunningham photographing the streets of New York, from Cezanne (married, but solitary nonetheless) painting Mt. St. Victoire over and over again, to the fiercely self-protective Zora Neale Hurston. Each character portrait is full of intense detail, the bright wakes they've left behind illuminating Fenton Johnson's own journey from his childhood in the backwoods of Kentucky to his travels alone throughout the world and the people he has lost and found along the way.
©2020 Fenton Johnson (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books