Spare, unsentimental, and distilled to riveting essentials, these stories honor the surreal, funny, often wrenching realities of trying to build a life far from home.
In the title story of Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut collection, a young girl brings a book home from school and asks her father, the only adult in the family who can read English, to help her pronounce a tricky word, a simple exchange with unforgettable consequences. Thammavongsa is a master at honing in on moments like this-moments of exposure, dislocation, and messy feeling that push us right smack up against the limits of language.
The taut, visceral stories that make up How to Pronounce Knife focus on characters struggling to find their bearings in unfamiliar territory, or shuttling between idioms, cultures, and values. A failed boxer discovers what it truly means to be a champion when he starts painting nails at his sister's salon. A young woman tries to discern the invisible but immutable social hierarchies that govern relationships at a chicken processing plant. A mother -coaches her daughter in the challenging art of worm harvesting. Charging her clear, direct sentences with immense power, Thammavongsa interrogates what it means to make a living, both in the sense of work and in the sense of creating meaning and identity in precarious circumstances.
Aiming its penetrating gaze at brutality and tenderness, revulsion and arousal, pain and laughter alike, How to Pronounce Knife establishes Thammavongsa as one of the most striking and assured voices of her generation.
