In the Province of the Gods is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Memoir/Biography.
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"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."
- Ford Madox Ford
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"Is this why I came to Japan? To ferry my dead across the Tamagawa?"
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"All is color and excess bordering on “kitsch,” for which there is no Japanese word."
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"These books move disability from the margins to the center, where they provide a critical lens to look at how we—disabled and nondisabled alike—live, or might live, our lives."
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"Japanese culture looks at impermanence as a part of life. . . It permeates so much of the culture from noh to butoh to garden design to the wonderfully crazy obsession with flowers, most evident to us in cherry blossom festivities."
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“Being disabled my entire life, I have yet to experience the kind of loss that MM must feel. To me, disability is the norm.”
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"I have always loved the way [Kenny Fries's} writing links the events of his own life with questions raised by the narratives of history. I had much I wanted to ask him about after reading In the Province of the Gods."
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"What makes a life worth living? Do looks, ability, and talent make your life more valuable than someone else's? Kenny Fries has made it his life’s work to understand just that."
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"For those of us who live with disabilities, when we think of access we mostly think of physical access: ramps, lifts, and technological aides. But cultural access is just as essential as physical access to an inclusive society."
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"Ultimately, Fries wrote 27 drafts, but it was not until the 23rd that the book finally found its form. . . . The finished book is less about disability in Japan than a meditation on how different cultures deal with impermanence and mortality."
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Passport Magazine calls In the Province of the Gods "a deeply resonant memoir that inspires gratitude in both writer and reader."
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Favorite book when you were a child? Book that changed your life? Kenny answers these and other questions.
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Watch and listen to two prominent writers with disabilities talk about disability, the body, Japan, and change.
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"Fries opens himself up to the page sharing his secrets and his quest to understand Japan, disability, and more importantly his place in the world."
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Elizabeth Foulke asks Kenny: "What continues to be overlooked in Western culture due to our lack of language for, or a lack of narratives that incorporate the experience of people with disabilities?
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Well-known disability rights activist and Ford Foundation Fellow Judy Heumann talks with Kenny about In the Province of the Gods, his article in The New York Times, and the importance of mentorship.
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A Plus Book Club Chooses In the Province of the Gods!
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"I am disabled, gay, and Jewish. A former boyfriend has called me The Nazi Trifecta."
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"Was Hearn’s attraction to strange things because he had one eye? Did he feel comfortable in Japan because being a foreigner overshadowed his physical difference?"
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