Yasmina Din Madden YOU KNOW NOTHING

April 30 | On-Site | 6:00 PM

Yasmina Din Madden YOU KNOW NOTHING in conversation with Vu Tran

Yasmina Din Madden’s debut collection, (Curbstone Books) follows women and girls as they navigate everyday life in contemporary America, exploring 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 will be in conversation with author Vu Tran. This is a free, ticketed event.

Doors and minibar open at 5:30PM

Getting here: We are located at 1620 Orrington Avenue, in downtown Evanston, just one block east of the Davis Street Metra and CTA public transit stops. There is metered street parking as well as numerous parking garages nearby.

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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.

VU TRAN is the author of —a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year. His writing has also appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly, and McSweeney’s. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, and is also the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Following women and girls as they navigate everyday life in contemporary America, 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.

“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

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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