Where Are You Really from - by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In these eight singular stories that pivot seamlessly from the terrible to the beautiful to the surreal, Elaine Hsieh Chou peels back the tales we tell ourselves to peer beneath them: at our unspoken desires, our self-deceptions and our capacity for cruelty, both to ourselves and each other"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

"Delicious, confessional, shocking, and poignant--it's impossible to put this masterful book down." --Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa

"Chou is the rare writer who can serve up dark truths with equal helpings of humor and heart." --Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl

From the critically-acclaimed author of Disorientation, a multi-genre story collection that explores the limits and possibilities of storytelling

A mail order bride from Taiwan is packed up in a cardboard box and sent via express shipping to California, where her much older husband awaits her. Two teenage girls meticulously plan how to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. An American au pair moves to Paris to find herself, only to find her actual French doppelgänger. A father reunites with his estranged daughter in unusual circumstances: as a background actor on the set of her film. A writer's affair with a married artist tests the line between fact and fiction, self-victimization and the victimization of others.

In these six singular stories and a novella that pivot from the terrible to the beautiful to the surreal, Elaine Hsieh Chou confronts the slipperiness of truth in storytelling. With razor-sharp precision and psychological acuity, she peels back the tales we tell ourselves to peer beneath them: at our treacherous desires, our self-deceptions and our capacity for cruelty, both to ourselves and each other. Expansive and provocative, Where Are You Really From is a visionary achievement.

Review Quotes

"A clutch of stories that starkly question assumptions about our identities . . . Chou's debut collection--following the novel Disorientation (2022)--is built on premises where characters' sense of self is rattled . . . Chou is gifted at storytelling with a surrealistic bent . . . The collection's title is a classic microaggression--a way to box people as foreign or other. Nobody in the book actually utters the question, but throughout Chou cleverly exposes just how difficult humanity is to simplify, whatever our provenance. Sharp storytelling that bends and blurs genre expectations." --Kirkus (starred review)

"The six stories and novella in this scintillating collection from Chou (Disorientation) explore themes of beauty, identity, and morality . . . Throughout, Chou's surrealism feels all too real, whether in the concluding novella, 'Casualties of Art, ' an intimate exploration of an illicit affair, or in 'Happy Endings, ' the story of a DNA researcher in Hong Kong who visits a virtual reality sex-bot brothel where intercourse is a 'constant negotiation, a high-wire act with the thinnest of lines separating pleasure from violence.' These expressive and atmospheric tales mesmerize." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Delicious, confessional, shocking, and poignant--this collection is like getting to hear every conversation at the world's most interesting dinner party. Chou crafts unexpected twists at the intersections of identity, sexuality, and obsession to make each story a wholly new surprise. It's impossible to put this masterful book down." --Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa

"It's the clarity of the voice that gets me here--Chou's worlds are strange and new and absurd, but the prose is utterly convincing and I found myself happily immersed in each new story's investigation. Thoroughly enjoyable!" --Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

"Chou is the rare writer who can serve up dark truths with equal helpings of humor and heart. Where Are You Really From is full of piercing insight, an ambitious and imaginative collection where surreal scenarios tell very human stories." --Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl

"In Where Are You Really From, Chou's stories drip with her signature dark humor and blistering wit--as well as a startling compassion. I was enamored by this collection's formal daring and speculative fiction aspects, as much as I admired Chou's exploration of identity, gender, and artifice. How can the murky lies we tell ourselves and others, our deceptions, and even fiction as an art form, be used to reveal deeper truths about ourselves and the world? A riotous, memorable, and altogether devastating book. My favorite short story collection that I've read this year." --Daphne Palasi Andreades, author of Brown Girls

"Elaine Hsieh Chou is a magnificent satirist and in Where Are You Really From, is right at home in the short form. These tales disquiet, provoke, and shimmer with intelligence like a school of fish. Most of all, they make you laugh, the kind of laughter that makes the truth almost bearable." --John Freeman, author of Dictionary of the Undoing

About the Author

Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American author and screenwriter from California. Described as "the funniest, most poignant novel of the year" by Vogue, her debut novel Disorientation was a New York Times Editors' Choice Book, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist and Thurber Prize Finalist. A former Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at New York University, her Pushcart Award-winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, Ploughshares and The Atlantic, while her essays appear in The Cut and Vanity Fair. She is a Fred R. Brown Literary Award recipient, a Sundance Episodic Lab Fellow and a Gotham Series Creator to Watch. Her work has been supported by the Harry Ransom Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts and Hedgebrook's Writers-in-Residence Program.