Scissors, Paper, Rock

by Fenton Johnson, Pam Houston (Introduction)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813166568
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	02/09/2016
Series:	Kentucky Voices
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Fenton Johnson is the author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, a New York Times Editors' Pick. He is author of the novels The Man Who Loved Birds; Scissors, Paper, Rock; and Crossing the River. In nonfiction, Johnson has published Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks. Geography received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best LGBT Creative Nonfiction, while Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary and Kentucky Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. His collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays (2017) touches on topics as diverse as San Francisco in the AIDS epidemic to spirituality to a youthful encounter with Ike and Tina Turner. A regular contributor to Harper's Magazine, Johnson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and nonfiction and has been featured on Terry Gross's Fresh Air. He has written the narrations and served as associate producer on several award-winning, internationally screened documentaries, among them Stranger with a Camera and La Ofrenda: Days of the Dead. He has taught in the graduate programs of Columbia, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and San Francisco State University. He is currently emeritus professor at the University of Arizona and teaches writing workshops across the nation. He is currently writing the histories of his enslaved and slave-owning Kentucky ancestors as well as that of his great-grandfather, a Union soldier.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Pam Houston
High Bridge
Back Where She Came From
Little Deaths
All Fall Down
The Way Things Will Always Be
Cowboys
Guilt
Scissors, Paper, Rock
Some Kind of Family
Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going?
Miss Camilla Speaks
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Read the eleven brief pieces of this brilliant novel and you'll never again hear its title phrase without feeling chills.... Emotional jolts lurk on every page.... Every few pages you'll pause, realizing you've just read one of the best paragraphs you've ever come across. Yes, the book's about dying, but in the same way that birthday parties are about growing old.

Entertainment Weekly

I finished Scissors, Paper, Rock in an unstoppable burst of enthralled reading last night. It is a wonderful book.

Richard Howard

The emotional power of Scissors, Paper, Rock resides on a plot of land in Kentucky.... [It] chronicles the courtships, the births, the deaths and the agonizing disappointments of two generations of the Hardins of Strang Knob... Scissors, Paper, Rock is a seductive rumination on the ways that memory can torment or soothe, and sometimes do both at the same time.

San Francisco Chronicle

Memory, love, grief, death and desire: these are the stuff of Fenton Johnson's... powerfully moving novel.

New York Times Book Review

"I finished Scissors, Paper, Rock in an unstoppable burst of enthralled reading last night. It is a wonderful book." -- Richard Howard, poet and professor of creative writing, Columbia University

"Memory, love, grief, death and desire: these are the stuff of Fenton Johnson's... powerfully moving novel." -- New York Times Book Review

"Read the eleven brief pieces of this brilliant novel and you'll never again hear its title phrase without feeling chills.... Emotional jolts lurk on every page.... Every few pages you'll pause, realizing you've just read one of the best paragraphs you've ever come across. Yes, the book's about dying, but in the same way that birthday parties are about growing old." -- Entertainment Weekly

"The emotional power of Scissors, Paper, Rock resides on a plot of land in Kentucky.... [It] chronicles the courtships, the births, the deaths and the agonizing disappointments of two generations of the Hardins of Strang Knob... Scissors, Paper, Rock is a seductive rumination on the ways that memory can torment or soothe, and sometimes do both at the same time." -- San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher