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 hypnotising 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.
Read: People Love a Story Where Someone Almost Dies, Electric Lit
First lines: I saved someone’s life once. A woman drowning in a river, and good thing because it’s my go-to party story. People love a story where someone almost dies. Really, that’s the part they love–not that a hero stepped in to save the day. People are morbid fucks when it comes right down to it. But I was that hero. Me.