You Know Nothing: Stories [Paperback]

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.Story by story, You Know Nothing explores the lives of women beholden to their bodies as they gain the courage to name and act on their desires, questioning the norms that threaten to silence them in realities both actual and imagined. 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. 

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by theChicago Review of Books

In her debut story collection of force and insight, Madden crafts a way into the interior lives of women young and old, empowered and repressed, exhausted, determined, and enraged. Booklist