Where Are You Really From
Stories
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, NPR AND ELECTRIC LIT • A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 BY LIT HUB, THE OC REGISTER, THE MILLIONS AND MORE • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF AUGUST 2025 BY PEOPLE MAGAZINE • NAMED A MUST-READ BOOK BY THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS • THE STRAND’S AUGUST 2025 PICK-OF-THE-MONTH • SELECTED AS AN AUGUST 2025 READ BY VULTURE
“Scintillating … These expressive and atmospheric tales mesmerize” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Chou is gifted at storytelling with a surrealistic bent … Sharp storytelling that bends and blurs genre expectations.” —Kirkus (starred review)
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The six stories and novella in this scintillating collection from Chou (Disorientation) explore themes of beauty, identity, and morality. In "Carrot Legs," a 13-year-old Taiwanese American girl visits her grandparents in Taipei, where she's indoctrinated by her manicured cousin, LaLa, into the city's ethos that "beauty was a choice." It's a message reinforced by the strange devices for sale at a local pharmacy, such as "funny-looking massagers designed to shrink your face." Taipei is also the point of origin for the mail-order bride purchased by an aging American man named Frank in "Mail Order Love." Ultimately, Frank gets more than he bargained for when his new wife, Bunny, adopts a liberating sense of self-confidence. Elsewhere, women's attempts to improve their circumstances lead to vexing situations. Elaine, a crestfallen American whose life has become like "a soggy newspaper discarded in the rain," travels to Paris to reinvent herself as an au pair only to encounter the horror of a doppelgänger who shadows her every move. 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.
