Disorientation -- Elaine Hsieh Chou, Paperback

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.

Author: Elaine Hsieh Chou
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 03/21/2023
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.27h x 5.35w x 0.87d
ISBN: 9780593298374

About the Author
Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. Her debut novel Disorientation was a New York Times Editors' Choice Book, a Malala Book Club Pick and an Indie Next Pick. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYFA Fellow, her Pushcart Award-winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Tin House Online, Ploughshares, LARB Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She was a Black Warrior Review Flash Fiction 2020 Contest Winner and an Iowa Review Awards 2020 Finalist. Her short story collection Where Are You Really From is forthcoming in 2024.