Disorientation Paperback by Ian Williams

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2025-07-29)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 216 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781039000247
• Item Weight: 192.78 grams
• Dimensions: 7.72 x 4.85 x 0.59 cm

HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION FINALIST

"Honest, vulnerable, courageous and funny..." —Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes

Bestselling, award-winning writer Ian Williams brings fresh eyes and new insights to today's urgent conversation on race and racism in startling, illuminating essays that grow out of his own experience as a Black man moving through the world.

With that one eloquent word, disorientation, Ian Williams captures the impact of racial encounters on racialized people—the whiplash that occurs while minding one's own business. Sometimes the consequences are only irritating; sometimes they are deadly. And Williams offers a perspective that is distinct from the recent, almost exclusively America-centric, bestselling books on race, because of one salient fact: he 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").

Inspired by the essays of James Baldwin, in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas, Williams explores such things 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—a stumbling block to meaningful change because no one feels responsible for the systemic structures of the past. Examining the past and the present in order to speak to the future, he offers new thinking, honest feeling, and his astonishing, piercing gift of language.

About the Author

IAN WILLIAMS is the author of seven acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He delivered the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, on rehabilitating conversations. Disorientation was selected as a best book of the year by the Boston Globe. Williams's debut novel, Reproduction, won the Giller Prize. His poetry collection, Word Problems, won the Raymond Souster Award, and his previous collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. Williams's short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. He is a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize and a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto.