Where Are You Really From: Stories by Elaine Hsieh Chou (HC)

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.

REVIEWS

“Where Are You Really From, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s stylistically complex story collection, offers intriguing glimpses into the ways in which we have become captive to a habit of continually evaluating our own identities. With glints of sardonic humor and razor-sharp surrealistic details, she reveals the layers of self hiding behind performative masks adopted by a wide range of characters.” —LitHub

“Chou is consistent in her ability to create an eerie, uncanny version of circumstances we could expect in real life. Each story ends in a way that makes you tip your head back in bewilderment, a reminder that there is no base reality on which everyone’s narrative is built . . . Where Are You Really From sparkles in the way it infuses dark concepts with whimsy and detail . . . Chou seems less invested in establishing a firm stance on anything and more about unsettling assumptions and questioning the first version of the story that you hear—her answer to the titular question is infinitely more questions.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Elaine Hsieh Chou’s clever and beguiling short story collection Where Are You Really From explores issues of identity and belonging with a speculative twist . . . She flips stereotypes on their ears, turning her stories into funhouse mirrors that challenge her protagonists—and readers—to navigate worlds that are both strange and all too familiar . . . All the stories showcase Chou’s audacious talent for wordplay alongside her deep empathy . . . The stories can become surprisingly tender or melancholic and wistful or even furious . . . Readers will delight in these thoughtful, provocative and often very, very funny stories.” —The Minnesota Star Tribune

PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover Edition
Publisher: Penguin Press
ISBN: 978-0593298381
Pages: 352