Miss Kim Knows: And Other Stories

About

Eight women confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman is told she's being too sensitive. A woman discovers that the rules she followed faithfully were never going to protect her. Cho Nam-Joo's stories track the full arc of contemporary Korean womanhood with the same razor-sharp prose that made Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 an international phenomenon. Each story is a precisely calibrated examination of a different intersection — gender and work, gender and motherhood, gender and public space, gender and silence. Cho's tone is deliberately flat, almost documentary, which makes the cumulative effect not less emotional but more: anger that has been compressed until it's diamond-hard. A collection that picks up where Kim Jiyoung left off — eight more women, eight more ways the system works exactly as designed.