How to Pronounce Knife

Critics Review

• 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

  Elle

• 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.

  i

• 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

  New York Times Book Review

• [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

  Daily Mail

• 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

  Cosmopolitan

• 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

  Vogue

• [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

  Stylist

• The stories are slender, spare, and slide between your ribs like a super-sharp blade, fast and soundless, before you realize what’s happening

  Vanity Fair

• [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

  Washington Post

• Exacting, sharply funny short fictions

  Oprah Magazine

• 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

  Daisy Johnson

• 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

• A riveting, subversive collection that alights within us like a shock to the system. I find it miraculous – and liberating and joyful – that language so radiantly exact can be so raw, so brazen. This is a major work and a lasting one

  Madeleine Thien

• Thammavongsa’s radiant debut collection of short stories is full of precarity, strength, uncertainty, messiness and life

  Ms. Magazine

• The stories here will gut you, as Thammavongsa’s insight proves to be razor-sharp

  Bustle

• A masterful collection, written with so much veracity, you’ll swear every word is true … Here is life, rendered with precision and insight. Instantly recognizable. She offers sharp sensory details, piercing imagery, endings that will punch you in the gut and leave you yearning for more

  Sharon Bala, author The Boat People

• A book of rarest beauty and power. Souvankham Thammavongsa has already earned a devoted readership for her poetry. And in each of these exquisitely crafted stories, we experience the profound emotional effects of economy and distillation. We feel the reverberating energy around each judiciously placed word. This is one of the great short story collections of our time. Do not miss it

  David Chariandy, author of Brother