Disaffections of Time is a fictional account of a modern wizard-like savant. The charismatic old man utilizes special powers of connecting seemingly unrelated trivia to discern meaningful solutions from his operational base--a coffee shop booth. His reputation enhances a local following. His encounters include a battered housewife, an illegal immigrant with a birth defect, a minority brick mason whose wife is dying, and a hapless bookie pursued by an organized crime syndicate. These encounters lead to dramatic and sometimes humorous interchanges. The major narrative is a compelling tale of romance involving young lovers separated by fate. Their story weaves throughout the novel to be meticulously resolved by the savant. Eventually, the elderly sage must travel forward in time. His exit intrigues. Disaffections of Time incorporates modern science, exotic sites, humorous exchanges, and mystical powers within a vividly descriptive literary flow. Romantic settings entice the reader and elevate the alluring sequences with intellectual discourse. The characters, locations, and events were developed from many of the author's wide personal experiences. Though this is his initial novel, the author has written seven previous books.

Complete poems--including work censored by the Fascists--from one of Italy's greatest post-war writers.

In Disaffected Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, these authors departed from the values that undergird the politics of recognition and the liberal project of inclusion. By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political strategy for people of color to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century, was a poet, novelist and diarist. Disaffections includes all the poems he wrote during the last two decades of his life, including work originally deleted by the Fascist censors and poems discovered after his death. Pavese was a political and an artistic radical. He was drawn towards American poetry and music, to the people and the idiom of the Blues, to the big-heartedness of Whitman. He evokes the world and the voices of men and women who, as he did, felt torn between the call of city and country, work and repose, desire and solitude. His poems, without ornament or afflatus, focus lyric moments or tell, in longer lines, a story, or invoke an image or a desire. Turin was the wearying world of his working life and Santo Stefano was the small town of childhood holidays and returns. In 1950 he was awarded the Strega Prize. 'The trouble with these things is that they always come when one is already through with them and running after strange, different gods.' Later that year he killed himself.Geoffrey Brock has received several major awards in the United States for his own poetry and for his translations of Italian poetry.

Globalization evokes mixed responses. It is praised for facilitating business, greater trade between nations and reducing poverty, and is also accused of causing job losses and homogenizing culture. While some nations cheer its benefits, others think of barriers to protect themselves. Yet, everyone agrees that it is a multidimensional and complex process that continuously reshapes our environment. Rather than wonder whether globalization is good or bad, it is important to understand how it impacts nations, organizations and individuals and be prepared to operate in that context.