Friday, August 21, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
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. Note: The author will be raffling off one copy of WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM and one copy of DISORIENTATION at the event. Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American author and screenwriter from California. Her debut novel DISORIENTATION was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, NYPL Young Lions Finalist and Thurber Prize Finalist. Her short story collection WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM was a California Book Award Finalist and named a Best Book of the Year by Time, NPR and Electric Literature. She has been supported by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Sundance Institute and Gotham. Greg Mania is an award-winning writer whose words have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Vanity Fair, HuffPost, and elsewhere. He is the author of the celebrated debut memoir, Born to Be Public, which was named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, among others. He lives in Los Angeles and is currently working on his debut novel.