The Great Refusal
A New Vision of Resistance
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- 予約注文
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- リリース予定日：2026年9月15日
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- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
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.
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From the outside, the author's life seemed like a success story: growing up a Black gay evangelical in the South, he rose from poverty to attend Yale and Harvard, landed a lucrative job in finance, and founded a nonprofit that helped young entrepreneurs. What no one saw, Gerald writes in his raw follow-up to There Will Be No Miracles Here, was that he had become profoundly disenchanted. By 2016, he "no longer believed" in the systems that had rewarded him. He "disbanded his organization and disappeared," admitting there were days where "all I could do was drink and take a nap." Paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut, Gerald notes that "at least half the people in America today" feel "already dead... worn down by the cruelty of this society." But he comes to see that his spiritual "dead end" might actually be a "doorway"—the beginning of "a revolution." Rather than "burning down the country," however, the revolution Gerald envisions entails radical love—"I shall avenge love in this sick and loveless land!... escue love from the rubble of abuse"—paired with a kind of opting out, a refusal to work either for or against the same old systems. If "we... take matters into our own hands," he asserts, it will build the "muscles for democracy," which, like love, "demand a willingness... to give of yourself... knowing that you may get nothing back." Studded with literary references from Achilles to Audre Lorde, it's a lyrical and provocative reckoning with America's existential malaise.
