ISBN-10: 0-9770797-0-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-9770797-0-4
Specs: Softcover, 176 pp.
Price: $14.95
Cover art © 2006 by Andrew Lambert
Cover design © 2009 by D’mon McNeil
G. Winston James’ stories examine the individual, familial, and societal complexities of desire. Candidly rendered, they unabashedly consider the formation of personal and sexual identity in a world in which the carnal is highly policed, variously dangerous and all too often denied. Shaming the Devil is an erotic, brutal, emotional and thoroughly thought-provoking debut collection that is likely to arouse, inspire and disturb readers, even as they continue, inexorably, to turn its astonishing pages. [READ REVIEWS]
James pulls out all the stops in this stunning collection, examining with an unflinching moral vision issues of not only sexuality and gender, but religion and community, race, violence, HIV/AIDS, intergenerational sex/eroticism, class and the life and death struggle at the center of every human heart… These are stories that need to be heard, and that shockingly even 40 years into the gay movement are still being silenced, ignored or overlooked… This is the most refreshing gay fiction I’ve read in years. [READ MORE FROM TREBOR HEALEY]
—Trebor Healey, Author of A Perfect Scar & Other Stories
There is no shame in James’ game. Shaming the Devil is a powerful book, and G. Winston James is a powerful writer. These stories are erotic, disturbing, yet healing and full of complexity and vulnerability all at once. James’ vision of sexuality and the human condition is soul-shaking, and his lyrical prose has a way of slicing right to the truth. As with Fyodor Dostoevsky, at times you begin to think G. Winston James knows everything about human nature. This book is like electricity, but reading it will do more than simply shock you.
—Randall Kenan, Department of English, University of North Carolina
Author of The Fire This Time
In the fiction of G. Winston James, sex is revolution, peep shows are poetry, and the dark places that exist in parks and public restrooms are lit with a blinding insight into the hearts of men. Shaming the Devil is a curt, subtle, fluid collection… The best new fiction I have read this year.
—Alphonso Morgan
Author of Sons
[I]ncredibly powerful collection of stories…Through his medley of narrators—from a naïve but inquisitive child to an urban, pants-sagging, hustling hip hopper, and subterranean sociopath—James immediately pulls us into what Toni Morrison calls a “galaxy of emotions,” indeed into a black (w)hole of human emotions that takes us on an exhausting yet exhilarating and, in the end, rewarding roller coaster ride as he sets out to tell the truth about the complexity of contemporary gay life…
—Dr. Wilfred D. Samuels, Department of English, University of Utah
Editor, Encyclopedia of African-American Literature
G. Winston James is a Jamaican-born poet, short fiction writer, essayist and editor. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and is the author of the poetry collection The Damaged Good: Poems Around Love and the Lambda Literary Award finalist collection Lyric: Poems Along a Broken Road. James is also co-editor of the historic anthologies, Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing and the Lambda Literary Award finalist publication Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay/Lesbian Identity.