Overview

Questioning the roles of women's bodies and the emotions that drive them in Madden's debut story collection Following women and girls as they navigate everyday life in contemporary America, You Know Nothing explores the experiences of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and lovers whose inner worlds are animated by a tangle of emotion - from desire to rage and everything in between. Yasmina Din Madden's characters inhabit the margins of their cultures, their diverse backgrounds united by their profound unease and the female bodies in which each resides. Madden takes us into the lives of a ravenous mother who devours her own son, a woman who sands away parts of her body, a Vietnamese mother facing her too-American children, and a fiercely protective dog owner who wanders a dog park with Satan's master. In this debut collection, Madden brings these characters to life in bite-size stories of surreal revelation and inquisitive long-form explorations alike, leaving newfound clarity and hypnotizing carnage in her wake.

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9780810149663

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Reviews

""Readers, I gasped. You Know Nothing is a triumph of imagination, heart, and understated emotion. These are tales you'd trade on the playground in an alternate universe--a universe you won't want to leave after reaching the last page. Each story unsettles as much as it entertains."" - Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under ""The propulsive, heart-wrenching stories of You Know Nothing explore the messy interiority of women who are on the brink of realization. With knife-sharp prose and unforgettable detail, Yasmina Din Madden pushes on her characters' bruises until the reader also feels the ache."" - Maggie Su, author of Blob: A Love Story ""You Know Nothing is a wonder. At times electrifyingly surreal, at times achingly realistic, these raw and vulnerable stories feature women brimming with desire and rage. A haunting debut."" - Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City

Author Information

Yasmina Din Madden is a Vietnamese American writer whose fiction and nonfiction have been published in Electric Literature, The Idaho Review, The Fairy Tale Review, and other journals. She is the winner of the 2022 Oxford Flash Prize, and she teaches creative writing and literature at Drake University.

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