In-Store: Elaine Hsieh Chou: Where Are You Really From w/ Larissa Pham

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
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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 K*ll 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.

Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American author and screenwriter from California. Described as “the funniest, most poignant novel of the year” by Vogue, her debut novel Disorientation was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award finalist and Thurber Prize finalist. A former Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at New York University, her Pushcart Award–winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, Ploughshares and The Atlantic, while her essays appear in The Cut and Vanity Fair. She is a Fred R. Brown Literary Award recipient, a Sundance Episodic Lab Fellow and a Gotham Series Creator to Watch. Her work has been supported by the Harry Ransom Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts and Hedgebrook’s Writers-in-Residence Program.

Larissa Pham is the author of the essay collection Pop Song, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Nation, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Aperture, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is an assistant professor of writing at the New School. Her debut novel, Discipline, is forthcoming from Random House in January 2026.

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