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Where Are You Really From: Stories Audiobook
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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.
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"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
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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 -
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 -
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
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About Elaine Hsieh Chou
Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. She was a 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow at New York University. Her short fiction appears in Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online, and Ploughshares. Disorientation is her first novel.
About the Narrators
Natalie Naudus is one of the most beloved audiobook narrators working today and now author of her debut novel, Gay the Pray Away.
Natalie Naudus is one of the most beloved audiobook narrators working today and now author of her debut novel, Gay the Pray Away.
Jacques Roy is a audio narrator and actor, known for The Lower Angels and Room and Board.