Margins
Where Are You Really From book cover
Where Are You Really From
Stories
2025
First Published
4.35
Average Rating
352
Number of Pages

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. 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 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.

Avg Rating
4.35
Number of Ratings
23
5 STARS
43%
4 STARS
48%
3 STARS
9%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Elaine Hsieh Chou
Author · 2 books
Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, her short fiction appears in Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online, and Ploughshares. Disorientation is her first novel.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved