How to Pronounce Knife
Winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize
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How to Pronounce Knife
Narrated by:
James Tang, Kulap Vilaysack
Buy Now for ₹377.22
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Narrated by:
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James Tang
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Kulap Vilaysack
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Written by:
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Souvankham Thammavongsa
WINNER OF THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
‘Spellbinding’ i
‘Breathtaking’ Elle
‘Powerhouses of feeling and depth’ Mary Gaitskill
‘Sharp and vital’ Daisy Johnson
An ex-boxer turned nail salon worker falls for a pair of immaculate hands; a mother and daughter harvest earthworms in the middle of the night; a country music-obsessed housewife abandons her family for fantasy; and a young girl's love for her father transcends language. In this stunning debut, Souvankham Thammavongsa captures the day-to-day lives of immigrants and refugees in a nameless city, illuminating hopes, disappointments, love affairs, and above all, the pursuit of a place to belong©2022 Souvankham Thammavongsa
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Critic Reviews
Every once in a while, you come across a book with writing so breathtaking that you take note of the author so you can read everything they ever write in the future. How to Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa is one of those books
Spellbinding ... A perfect marriage of style and refreshing, surprising substance. Like her characters, Thammavongsa possesses x-ray vision for teetering power structures and those who sit precariously at the top of them. But her writing goes beyond this. It actively, though quietly, works against the invisibility or erasure of migrants living and trying to make a living in the margins.
Impressive … Thammavongsa’s spare, rigorous stories are preoccupied with themes of alienation and dislocation, her characters burdened by the sense of existing unseen … Thammavongsa’s gift for the gently absurd means the stories never feel dour or predictable … It is when the characters’ sense of alienation follows them home, into the private space of the family, that Thammavongsa’s stories most wrench the heart
[Souvankham Thammavongsa's] poignant, affecting debut collection conversationally captures the everyday lives of immigrants and refugees who have moved to the city in the hope of better lives
In this touching debut, the Thailand-born, Toronto-raised author captures the day-to-day lives of immigrants and refugees in a nameless city with universal hopes, disappointments, love affairs, and a desire to belong ... stand-out
This series of short stories brings to life figures that might otherwise not figure on the literary radar ... with enough panache to keep the reader gripped throughout
[Thammavongsa] captures the day-to-day lives of immigrants and refugees exploring family relationships, escape from the real world and the love that binds us all
The stories are slender, spare, and slide between your ribs like a super-sharp blade, fast and soundless, before you realize what’s happening
[Thammavongsa’s] careful dissection of everyday moments of racism, classism and sexism exposes how power and privilege drive success, how work shapes the immigrant identity, and how erasure and invisibility lead to isolation
Exacting, sharply funny short fictions
These stories feel simple but they move within you and it is impossible to let them go. They are sharp and vital. Thammavongsa is a master over the sentence
These poignant and deceptively quiet stories are powerhouses of feeling and depth; How to Pronounce Knife is an artful blend of simplicity and sophistication (Mary Gaitskill)
I love these stories. There’s some fierce and steady activity in all of the sentences – something that makes them live, and makes them shift a little in meaning when you look at them again and they look back at you (or look beyond you) (Helen Oyeyemi)
Souvankham Thammavongsa writes with deep precision, wide-open spaces, and quiet, cool, emotionally devastating poise. There is not a moment off in these affecting stories (Sheila Heti)
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