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.

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. 

Splinter
A Woman of Appetites
And This Is How It Ended
At the Dog Park
Then Go to Paris, I Say
Five Things You Should Know about Number Five
Beggars’ Night
Snow
The De Facto Mother
Trimmed
A Gook, Not a Chink 
Guidance Counseling
Night
The Motherland Is Bleeding
Husked
Party Stories
X+ Y = Something
Your Child’s Progress
They Say the Light Is Magical
Ringed
We Wonder
Heat
Once
In the Corn Fields
Naming Things
When Georgia Simpson Awakes
Swan Dive
Zero Sum Game
Rococo
Winter Witch
Perspectives
Neutrality
Reflections
Loin Product
Bunny
She Wasn’t
That Baby
How to Be Your Mother’s Best Daughter
Sal and Dean Are Dicks
Destruction Myth
Neighborhood Watch
Acknowledgments