Miss Kim Knows
And Other Stories
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
One of TIME's Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024: "A thought-provoking anthology for the #MeToo age."
From the international best-selling author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, a collection exploring the intimacies of contemporary Korean womanhood.
Literary Hub • Best Book Covers of October 2024
Written in Cho Nam-joo’s signature razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows follows eight women as they confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again. As with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, these microcosmic stories prove eerily relatable under Cho Nam-joo’s precise, unveiled gaze, offering another captivating read from an essential voice in fiction.
“There is mischief and glee to be found in these pages, along with the kind of laughter that sets two women over 50 rolling in snow with tears streaming down their frozen cheeks and the aurora borealis dancing above them.” —Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The characters in this perceptive collection from Cho (Kim Ji-young, Born 1982) chafe against their families' expectations and try out new roles in their lives. The pensive "Under the Plum Tree" follows subtle alterations in the relationship between two octagenarian sisters after one of them is diagnosed with Alzheimer's and the other changes her name, a move her husband resisted while he was alive. In "Runaway," a woman who defied her father's wishes that she live at home until marriage returns to visit her mother after her father runs off. In his absence, the family develops new routines, such as eating food he banned from the house. The sardonic title story, told from the point of view of an unhappy new employee at a dysfunctional ad agency, chronicles the consequences when her boss fires a coworker who had quietly held the business together. In the acidic "Dear Hyunnam Oppa," which takes the form of a woman's break-up letter to her abusive boyfriend, she sarcastically thanks him for making all the decisions for them and taking care of her. While some of the stories, including "Puppy Love, 2020," set during the Covid-19 pandemic, are relatively slight, most are fueled by a palpable sense of rebellion. Taken together, the chorus of voices produces a stirring feminist anthem.
