How to Pronounce Knife

Stories

By: Souvankham Thammavongsa

Narrated by: James Tang, Kulap Vilaysack

Named one of the New York Times' "7 New Books to Watch Out for in April," this revelatory story collection honors characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary "grunt work of the world."

In the title story of Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut collection, a young girl brings a book home from school and asks her father to help her pronounce a tricky word, a simple exchange with unforgettable consequences. Thammavongsa is a master at homing in on moments like this—moments of exposure, dislocation, and messy feeling that push us right up against the limits of language. The stories that make up How to Pronounce Knife focus on characters struggling to build lives 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 at a chicken processing plant. A mother coaches her daughter in the challenging art of worm harvesting. In a taut, visceral prose style that establishes her as one of the most striking and assured voices of her generation, Thammavongsa interrogates what it means to make a living, to work, and to create meaning.

Winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize

“As the daughter of refugees, I’m able to finally see myself in stories.”—Angela So, Electric Literature

©2020 Souvankham Thammavongsa (P)2020 Little, Brown & Company

Critic reviews

**Named one of the most anticipated books of 2020 by Electric Literature, The Millions, and Ms. Magazine**

**Named one of the most anticipated books of the month by the New York Times, O. The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Bustle, and Salon**

"An impressive debut...Thammavongsa's spare, rigorous stories are preoccupied with themes of alienation and dislocation, her characters burdened by the sense of existing unseen... Her gift for the gently absurd means the stories never feel dour or predictable, even when their outcomes are by some measure bleak...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."—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"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, author of VERONICA and SOMEBODY WITH A LITTLE HAMMER

"In sparse prose braced with disarming humor, Thammavongsa offers glimpses into the daily lives of immigrants and refugees in a nameless city, illuminating the desires, disappointments, and triumphs of those who so often go unseen...Though short enough to read in one sitting, [these stories] feel vast in their scope, offering ample room to wander."—THE PARIS REVIEW

A truly delightful book

These short stories are very well written and so different from any thing else I have read. I was given short vivid insights into what living as an immigrant from Laos in this country was like. I enjoyed the book very much.

Good collection

I enjoyed these short stories overall. There were one or two that didn’t resonate with me, but the others were interesting. I liked learning a bit about the Laos culture as well.

Resonated...

The stories resonate in my heart & mind. The struggles that parents endure to make a better life for their child/children and forcing their desire on them, while the children struggle to make/find their own dreams, but often give up to protect their parent(s) or disappoint them in attempts to belong outside the realm of their parents' experience. The stories without that theme nevertheless evoke emotions like brushstrokes on the canvas of my senses. If you grew up with insecurities, whether or not you outgrew them, these stories will resonate with you.

When Hope Is Survival

“How to Pronounce Knife” is a collection of snippets of life for Laotian immigrants to the US. Once you know that much, the title makes sense. We all can remember times when we were learning to read when we asked ourselves or our teacher, “Why is it spelled like that? Why are there so many letters in ‘thought’ when you only need ‘thot’ and why is ‘though’ pronounced like ‘tho’ when it is only missing one letter?”

I came away from this book with mixed feelings. On the one hand, with my experience of having lived most of my life as a foreigner (American) living in an Asian country, and also my work with Vietnamese refugees trying to adapt to life in America while trying to overcome the personal traumas they had experienced in Vietnam and as boat people escaping from there, I feel I better understood some of their feelings. I identified with so many  things about the characters in the book, from their struggle with the language, of looking so different and out of place, the giggles when you make cultural faux pas and you don’t even know what you said or did wrong, and the dependence on others sometimes to help with the most basic and simplest of tasks. Of course, I didn’t experience most of this to the same extent as they did, partly because the people where I lived were so gracious and wanting to help, and also because I didn’t have to struggle with low-paying jobs and others looking down on me for my position. Still, there was a great deal that struck home. 

But, I was looking for more coherence to the stories. I kept expecting to find some characters that appeared in more than one story. And, I found each story cut off too soon, just at the point where you might think that something was about to happen, for better or worse. The author could have told me more. I wanted some conclusions, some endings to the stories. 

Yet, it still kept pushing my thinking. Maybe the lack of endings was on purpose. Real lives don’t have conclusions until death, and even then the endings are not complete. In fact, maybe the point was that, for immigrants from a culture so very different from ours and especially for those who come from the bottom rung of the ladder, the best that most can hope for is continuation, not conclusion. The focus of most Americans is on immigrants taking jobs from Americans, but in this book, we see more of immigrants being exploited and held back. It exposes racism and our own assumptions that we are an equal society where anyone can get ahead. 

The adults are just trying to survive, sometimes by holding everything inside and plodding on, sometimes by focusing on a narrow area and trying to make that their own, from becoming a rabid fan or Randy Travis to working so hard to be the best at your job that you provoke the resentment of others. 

The children are torn between wanting to fit in and yet trying to still be Lao. Others go to the extreme of one or the other. And even among the immigrants there are sometimes similar divisions that can divide them. 

These are brief snippets built around one short turning point in a life, but in the end they do come together to show the struggles with the dreams. And maybe this book will help others see the real people who clean their offices, do their nails, and work on farms. By the end, I found that I liked the book better than I had thought.

Wow

Each story left me wanting to hear more, to know more. Yet they each ended; sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, each one beautiful.

Wonderful collection

Beautifully written stories relating the life and struggles of contemporary immigrants and their adjustments to a new country.

Amazing

An engaging, inspiring and entertaining glimpse into life and lives. Thank you. I think I’ll groom my toe nails now.

Short. Sweet. Different. Real.

I stumbled on this little collection of Laoan short stories while browsing on Audible. Each story is full of heart. Some stories are sprinkled with a bit of sadness and others get a hefty dose of "this is just the way life goes." The main characters of these vignettes are resolute yet unsure, confident yet vulnerable. The title story left me feeling like that brief period in early childhood when my parents were infallible, and I fiercely defended them against any kid who dared speak ill. Oh, how that view of my mom and dad did change with each birthday that passed into my rear-view, but I digress. The story featuring a lonely, frustrated middle-aged woman hit too close to home, although she was ultimately braver than I ever could dream of being once her attention turned towards a youthful neighbor. The cultural differences were present throughout, but they didn't detract from the enjoyability of these brief glimpses into what it is to simply be human, no matter your country of origin or current locale.

I listened to the audiobook version and the narrators generally performed well. I felt the female narrator expressed more emotion in her performance as opposed to the male narrator who more or less reads words from a page and rarely sounds as if he's truly invested in making the stories sound unique and separate in their own right. At the same turn, I highly respect all narrators who work hard to record my much-loved audio entertainment, as I would sound like an uncultured Southerner with a frequently incomprehensible backwoods drawl by comparison.

Meh

Some of these stories have really powerful moments (especially Picking Worms) but overall they’re forgettable. Luckily it only took an hour to listen to the book.

What a treat! I loved this Book

I have never read a book by this Author. What a gem this was. I will now look up all her Literary work and indulge in them fully. I loved all the stories- my favorite was mani pedi.
The readers brought out all the emotions to the surface. These short stories belong to the same class as NPR’s Selected Shorts.
Bravo, well done!