God Says No - Paperback

by James Hannaham (Author)

A Lambda Award Finalist: a black gay man struggles with his marriage, faith, and desires in this "tender, funny tour of a mind struggling to do the right thing" (Steve Martin).

Gary Gray marries his first girlfriend, a fellow student from Central Florida Christian College who loves Disney World as much as he does. They are nineteen, God-fearing, and eager to start a family. But a week before their wedding Gary goes into a rest-stop bathroom and lets something happen.

God Says No is his testimony--the story of a young black Christian struggling with desire and belief, with his love for his wife and his appetite for other men, told in a singular, emotional voice. Driven by desperation and religious visions, the path that Gary takes--from revival meetings to out life in Atlanta to a pray-away-the-gay ministry in Memphis, Tennessee--gives a riveting picture of how a life like his can be lived, and how it can't.

A Stonewall Book Award Pick 2010

Finalist for the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction

"A revelatory and sympathetic guide to a misunderstood world." --Steve Martin, author of Shopgirl and Born Standing Up

Front Jacket

"A tender, funny tour of a mind struggling to do the right thing. A
revelatory and sympathetic guide to a misunderstood world."
--Steve Martin, author of "Shopgirl" and "Born Standing Up"
"James Hannaham's GOD SAYS NO introduces a groundbreaking new American
voice: a writer of spectacular sentences who has trained his sights on a
world that has hardly been touched by literary fiction. Topical and
ambitious, disturbing and hilarious, GOD SAYS NO is everything a person
could ask of a first novel -- and twice that much. "
--Jennifer Egan, author of "Look at Me" and "The Keep"

"This novel is an absolute original. Gary Gray's search for wholeness and
acceptance is a heartfelt (and often very funny) plea for all men (and
women) to be embraced just as they are. A wonderful debut."
--Martha Southgate, author of "Third Girl From The Left"

"GOD SAYS NO is a book that was desperate to be written but well out of
reach. And then James Hannaham came along and wrote it, with the kind of
care, wit, sympathy and fury that the book deserved. Imagine Candide...--
okay, imagine Candide as a black man, a southerner, a Christian
fundamentalist, middle-class, obese, married, a father, and utterly, even
profoundly gay.
If a comedy, in the classical sense, is a story then ends in a
marriage, and a tragedy is a story that ends with a death, then what do you
call a book that ends with a split and a resurrection? A truly daring first
novel, and something to read."
--Jim Lewis, author of "Why the Tree Loves the Ax"

Author Biography

James Hannaham received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the Pratt Institute.