"A struggling PhD student makes a shocking discovery about a famous Chinese American poet that sets into motion a series of escalating events, both humorous and fraught, that culminates in an incendiary reckoning of her relationships, beliefs, and identity"--

Award-winning writer Ian Williams brings a fresh point of view and new insights to the urgent conversation on race and racism in these illuminating essays born from his own experience as a Black man in the world. With that one eloquent word, disorientation, 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...

Citizens of the Broken Compass is a collection of articles dealing with a range of topics from the theory of evolution to human rights. Intelligent yet accessible, it aims at promoting dialogue about the growing discrepancy between our technological achievements and our ethical sensitivities; proposing the ethical disorientation in society cannot be, separated from the religious confusions stemming from a radical, fundamentalist view of Christianity....

"Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including...

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,...

"A city is struck by an epidemic of "white blindness." Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards under instructions to shoot anyone trying to escape. Inside, the criminal element among the blind holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers--among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears--through...

Anatoly Kurchatkin's novel, set in Russia and Thailand, ranges in time from the Brezhnev years of political stagnation, when Soviet values seemed set to endure for eternity, through Gorbachev's Perestroika and the following tumultuous and disorientating decades. Under the surface, ancient currents are influencing the destinies of mathematician Rad, art gallery owner Jenny, entrepreneur (and spy?) Dron, American investor Chris, redundant Soviet diplomat...

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Really? Words can break spirits, destroy confidence. They can also build hope and incite great acts of heroism. Playwrights know this, and so do theater audiences. Otherwise, why go? Words matter and carry clout every bit as dangerous as a hammer or crowbar. This, too, playwrights know. The monologues in this volume are full of such blows, striking at our imaginations and our memories,...

In an elegant and penetrating first short-story collection, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived, Lily Tuck's characters travel to unknown, exotic places and, while there, find themselves deeply immersed in observation -- of the natives, the local customs, the foreign landscape -- in an effort to discern some elemental truth about who they themselves are. Instead, these women meet with disorientation, confusion; they are disappointed by the people...