A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE SELECTION * A MALALA BOOK CLUB PICK * AN INDIE NEXT PICK * A FAVORITE BOOK OF 2022 BY NPR AND BOOK RIOT * A MUST-READ MARCH 2022 BOOK BY TIME, VANITY FAIR, EW AND THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS * A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY GOODREADS, NYLON, BUZZFEED AND MORE A Taiwanese American woman’s coming-of-consciousness ignites eye-opening revelations and chaos on a college campus in this outrageously hilarious and startlingly tender debut novel. Twenty-nine-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou and never read about “Chinese-y” things again. But after years of grueling research, all she has to show for her efforts are junk food addiction and stomach pain. When she accidentally stumbles upon a curious note in the Chou archives one afternoon, she convinces herself it’s her ticket out of academic hell. But Ingrid’s in much deeper than she thinks. Her clumsy exploits to unravel the note’s message lead to an explosive discovery, upending not only her sheltered life within academia but her entire world beyond it. With her trusty friend Eunice Kim by her side and her rival Vivian Vo hot on her tail, together they set off a roller coaster of mishaps and misadventures, from book burnings and OTC drug hallucinations, to hot-button protests and Yellow Peril 2.0 propaganda. In the aftermath, nothing looks the same to Ingrid—including her gentle and doting fiancé, Stephen Greene. When he embarks on a book tour with the super kawaii Japanese author he’s translated, doubts and insecurities creep in for the first time… As the events Ingrid instigated keep spiraling, she’ll have to confront her sticky relationship to white men and white institutions—and, most of all, herself. For readers of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, this uproarious and bighearted satire is a blistering send-up of privilege and power in America, and a profound reckoning of individual complicity and unspoken rage. In this electrifying debut novel from a provocative new voice, Elaine Hsieh Chou asks who gets to tell our stories—and how the story changes when we finally tell it ourselves.

Sexual Disorientations brings some of the most recent and significant works of queer theory into conversation with the overlapping fields of biblical, theological and religious studies to explore the deep theological resonances of questions about the social and cultural construction of time, memory, and futurity. Apocalyptic, eschatological and apophatic languages, frameworks, and orientations pervade both queer theorizing and theologizing about time, affect, history and desire. The volume fosters a more explicit engagement between theories of queer temporality and affectivity and religious texts and discourses.

A Boston Globe Best Book of 2021: “Lyrical, closely observed” essays on being Black in the US, Canada, and Trinidad, and how those experiences differed (Kirkus Reviews). Finalist for the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction With that one eloquent word, disorientation, Scotiabank Giller Award winner Ian Williams captures the impact of racial encounters on racialized people—the whiplash of race that occurs while minding one’s own business. Sometimes the consequences are only irritating, but sometimes they are deadly. Spurred by the police killings and street protests of 2020, Williams offers a perspective that is distinct from that of US writers addressing similar themes. Williams has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of “only”). He brings these formative experiences fruitfully to bear on his theme in Disorientation. Inspired by the essays of James Baldwin, in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas, Williams explores such matters as the unmistakable moment when a child realizes they are Black; the ten characteristics of institutional whiteness; how friendship forms a bulwark against being a target of racism; the meaning and uses of a Black person’s smile; and blame culture—or how do we make meaningful change when no one feels responsible for the systemic structures of the past. Disorientation is a book for all readers who believe that civil conversation on even the most charged subjects is possible. Employing his wit, his empathy for all, and his vast and astonishing gift for language, Ian Williams gives readers an open, candid, and personal perspective on an undeniably important subject. “Honest, vulnerable, courageous and funny.” —Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes

Poetry. African American Studies. Drifting from New Mexico with lawman Elfego Baca to Ricardo Molinari's Buenos Aires all the way back to ancient Alexandria, DISORIENTATIONS: GROUNDINGS offers an erudite and at times dizzying exploration of our mortal limits. Metaphysical in both content and manner of metaphor, these poems are in constant dialogue with the physical sciences, mathematics, and number theory. The result is a startling, quixotic, and truly original poetry.

This book is a philosophical exploration of disorientation and its significance for action. Disorientations are human experiences of losing one's bearings, such that life is disrupted and it is not clear how to go on. In the face of life experiences like trauma, grief, illness, migration, education, queer identification, and consciousness raising, individuals can be deeply disoriented. These and other disorientations are not rare. Although disorientations can be common and powerful parts of individuals' lives, they remain uncharacterized by Western philosophers, and overlooked by ethicists. Disorientations can paralyze, overwhelm, embitter, and misdirect moral agents, and moral philosophy and motivational psychology have important insights to offer into why this is. More perplexing are the ways disorientations may prompt improved moral action. Ami Harbin draws on first person accounts, philosophical texts, and qualitative and quantitative research to show that in some cases of disorientation, individuals gain new forms of awareness of political complexity and social norms, and new habits of relating to others and an unpredictable moral landscape. She then argues for the moral and political promise of these gains. A major contention of the book is that disorientations have 'non-resolutionary effects': they can help us act without first helping us resolve what to do. In exploring these possibilities, Disorientation and Moral Life contributes to philosophy of emotions, moral philosophy, and political thought from a distinctly feminist perspective. It makes the case for seeing disorientations as having the power to motivate profound and long-term shifts in moral and political action. A feminist re-envisioning of moral psychology provides the framework for understanding how they do so.

The fields of comparative and world literature tend to have a unidirectional, Eurocentric focus, with attention to concepts of “origin” and “arrival.” DisOrientations challenges this viewpoint. Kristin Dickinson employs a unique multilingual archive of German and Turkish translated texts from the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. In this analysis, she reveals the omnidirectional and transtemporal movements of translations, which, she argues, harbor the disorienting potential to reconfigure the relationships of original to translation, past to present, and West to East. Through the work of three key figures—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schrader, and Sabahattin Ali—Dickinson develops a concept of translational orientation as a mode of omnidirectional encounter. She sheds light on translations that are not bound by the terms of economic imperialism, Orientalism, or Westernization, focusing on case studies that work against the basic premises of containment and originality that undergird Orientalism’s system of discursive knowledge production. By linking literary traditions across retroactively applied periodizations, the translations examined in this book act as points of connection that produce new directionalities and open new configurations of a future German-Turkish relationship. Groundbreaking and erudite, DisOrientations examines literary translation as a complex mode of cultural, political, and linguistic orientation. This book will appeal to scholars and students of translation theory, comparative literature, Orientalism, and the history of German-Turkish cultural relations.

Exploring the fraught processes of Spaniards' efforts to formulate a national identity - from the Enlightenment to the present - this book focuses on the nation's Islamic-African legacy, disputing the received wisdom that Spain has consistently rejected its historical relationship to Muslims and Africans.