A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE BOOK * NYPL YOUNG LIONS FINALIST * THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOR FINALIST * SHORTLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD * A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY NPR, VOGUE, JEZEBEL AND BOOK RIOT * INDIE NEXT PICK * MALALA BOOK CLUB PICK * A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK 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 a junk food addiction and stomach pain. When she accidentally stumbles upon a curious note in the Chou archives one afternoon, it looks like 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 her entire life and the lives of those around her. What follows is a roller coaster of mishaps and misadventures, from book burnings and OTC drug hallucinations, to hot-button protests and Yellow Peril 2.0 propaganda. 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. A blistering send-up of privilege and power, and a profound reckoning of individual complicity and unspoken rage, in Disorientation Elaine Hsieh Chou asks who gets to tell our stories—and how the story changes when we finally tell it ourselves. “[F]unny and insightful, with plenty to say about art, identity, Orientalism and the politics of academia.” — New York Times Book Review “The hyperactive satire is so consistently funny it almost makes the reader forget about the serious societal issues that undergird the humor . . . Disorientation does what great comedies and satires are supposed to do: make you laugh while forcing you to ponder the uncomfortable implications of every punchline.” — The Washington Post “[A] literary satire that takes a hilarious and refreshingly honest look at the power dynamics of college campuses . . . This one will have you rolling over with laughter and texting your college group chat.” —NPR, Books We Love 2022 “A rollicking, whip-smart ride through the hallowed halls of academia.” — Harper’s Bazaar “The pleasures of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s campus satire are in high supply . . . In the tradition of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot , Chou has written a delightful new chapter of dark academia.” — Vogue “As the best comedy does, Disorientation manages to highlight uncomfortable truths, capture gray areas and hard lines, and resist sliding into easy binaries of heroes and villains.” — Vanity Fair , Books We Couldn’t Put Down This Month “[H]ilarious and harrowing… Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation is a rollicking satire of graduate-school life, Asian-American overachievers, and the peculiar injustices of the university . . . Disorientation is a page-turner studded with razor-sharp one-liners . . . Its twists and turns propel the plot while skewering topics from anti–affirmative action sentiment among Asian Americans to the jargon-heavy stylings of academic prose to the diabolically chameleonic quality of the American right. Along the way, Ingrid’s archival mystery leads her out of her dissertation funk and into a tangle of betrayal and deception that forces her to reevaluate her own self-deceiving beliefs about what it means to be an Asian scholar and an Asian woman in America.” — New York Review of Books “This book has so many stifle-a-strangled-laugh lines you might want to refrain from reading it in a library or a train’s quiet car. Chou’s novel is a send-up of the polite, cardigan-draped white supremacy of liberal arts colleges . . . Between hiring a private investigator, staging a break in, flooding a gender neutral bathroom, and smoking weed with a professor, she uncovers a shocking truth—an act of racism in the academic world that had gone unnoticed for decades . . . In an entertaining takedown, Chou explores who the university really belongs to.” — Glamour “This funny, fearless debut novel about a student’s dissertation on a fictional poet dives into the maelstrom of topical arguments about race and comes up fighting . . . [ Disorientation ] gets candid about the concept of model minorities, the stickiness of inter-racial dating and the way misogyny violently affects Asian women.” — The Observer “[ Disorientation ] is captivating, irresistible, and intensely readable, and what we ultimately come to literature to find . . . The book expands in scope with each passing page, integrating newer and more experimental forms and swallowing larger subject matter. We begi