The Great Refusal

In the spirit of American cultural prophecy—from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Rebecca Solnit—acclaimed writer Casey Gerald offers a groundbreaking work of joyous dissent and stunning vision, a survival guide to a society in crisis.

“Somehow Casey Gerald has pulled off the most urgently political, most deeply personal, and most engagingly spiritual statement of our time by just looking outside his window and inside himself. Extraordinary.” —Marlon James on There Will Be No Miracles Here

Most afternoons for the past three years, Casey Gerald took a walk. He would pass the compound that Elon Musk was building in his neighborhood; the burned-down Freedman’s church; the little house where he and his lover Jack had seen a shooting star. He knew the world was crumbling, but he didn’t fret. He had been promised: When it breaks, you’ll be ready.

“There is a great unfolding going on,” Gerald writes, “and all the clues for what’s to come are planted in the people.” In this quietly redemptive and lyrical book, Gerald shares his map for finding those clues, finding each other, and finding our way out of this dark and wearied time. On the other side of No, Gerald insists, there is a Yes—an embrace of what we really want, what we might finally claim once we refuse.

Calling forth a kaleidoscopic cast, from Odysseus to D’Angelo, Sun Tzu to Simone Biles, Black literati and desert mystics, Gerald implores us to take our power back and to remake the world together, on our terms. Written with Didion’s cold eye and Baldwin’s unflinching urgency, and with the dark humor of a man who’s seen too much but still wants to see what’s next, The Great Refusal is a lifeline from the other side of ruin.

• “True hope and radical medicine for a sick world. The Great Refusal is lifesaving work, now part of the deep lineage of liberation objects. I read it in one sitting while time stood still and my heart expanded. I’m shook, moved, and soothed by this book’s power. One of the most beautiful pieces of work I’ve ever read.”
  Tricia Hersey, author of Rest is Resistance
• “What truly lets us achieve a life worth living? Every generation needs a Casey Gerald to answer: a seeker disguised as a stunning writer, who enters the cave and returns to us with treasure. The Great Refusal is an indispensable work for the reckoning of this era.”
  Sarah Lewis, author of The Unseen Truth
• “Stunning and revelatory, an affirmation of the possibilities that rest within us and a challenge to be brave enough to seek them. The Great Refusal is an urgent love letter to a crumbling world and its lost inhabitants. Read this book to discover something greater about our shared dignity and the community—revolutionary and transcendent—we can build.”
  Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
• “The Great Refusal is a captivating and sharply insightful blend: deeply imaginative and unerringly practical, intimate and political, hopeful and loving yet unflinchingly honest. Casey Gerald asks us to choose us, which is—in fact—to choose freedom, and let the rest go.”
  Imani Perry, author of Black in Blues