Where Are You Really from: Stories

“Chou’s pen is a scalpel.” —Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster

A psychologically complex, genre-bending story collection from the author of Disorientation that reimagines narrative, one story at a time

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. A teenage girl with body dysmorphia meticulously plans how to kill and cook her 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. And in “Casualties of Art,” 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 genre and the very nature of storytelling itself. With razor-sharp perceptiveness, 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. Provocative and expansive, Where Are You Really From is a visionary achievement that explores the limits and possibilities of our humanity.