How to Pronounce Knife: Stories

Written by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Narrated by James Tang and 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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Apr 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781549119538

Souvankham Thammavongsa

Souvankham Thammavongsa's fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, the Paris Review and more. Her collection of short stories, How to Pronounce Knife, won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2021 Trillium Book Award, and her poetry has won numerous prizes. Born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, she was raised and educated in Toronto. Pick a Colour, her first novel, won the 2025 Giller Prize.

Reviews for How to Pronounce Knife

[thorold_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An agreeable enough story collection, pleasant reading but nothing extraordinary. It felt a bit too much like the sort of thing they teach you to write in creative writing courses. The author knows when to stop, which is important in short stories(!), but I didn’t feel that she had introduced me to any really distinctive characters.

Whilst about half of the stories are explicitly set among members of the Lao diaspora in Canada, the themes they pick up — as in the title story — just seemed to be rather generic bits of immigrant experience with added papaya salad, not really telling us anything specific about what it means to come from a family that have been obliged to leave Laos as refugees.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lovely stories, mostly about young people in Lao immigrant families in the US.

[sriddell_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A short collection of stories depicting the lives of Laos immigrants and their children.

Their triumphs and humiliations, the dissonance between the generations, the push/pull of making a new life in a new country vs missing what's been left behind - the stories are poignant and thoughtful. Each story was like a peek into the unique universe that each family makes.

[librarycin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars

This is a book of short stories. She is a Lao-Canadian author, so the stories focus on Lao immigrants’ experiences.

I enjoyed the stories as I read them, so I’m giving this a “good” rating, but like with the majority of short stories I read, I forget them. Even by the end of the (short) book, I have forgotten most of the stories. I give plenty of short story collections an “ok” rating, since I usually find they vary – I like some, but not others – but these (even listening on audio) were almost all ones I liked. I’m not sure if the author meant to set the stories in Canada or the US. I initially assumed Canada, since she is Canadian, but one of the stories referred to all the money being green, so that would be the US. I guess it doesn’t matter, overall.

[paradiseporch · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm a fan of short story collections and this one won Canada's prestigious Giller Prize so I highly anticipated it. Sadly, it couldn't live up to the hype. That's not to say that the stories weren't interesting - I am keen to try to understand the "immigrant experience" and these gave me a porthole to one: Vietnamese people in Canada.

This is not a bad book, but the Giller is becoming more and more about politics and appearance rather than the "best" book. In that regard (politics and appearance), this book is a winner.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The 14 stories in this collection present a moving portrait of the immigrant experience. Like the author, most of the central characters are Laotian immigrants, and they are struggling to find their place in their new homelands. Many, like the retired boxer in "Mani Pedi," are out of their element in more ways than one. Unable to find work, he mans a station at his sister's nail salon. Two children experience Halloween for the first time. A mother and daughter take jobs at a worm farm. A housewife becomes enamored of Randy Travis. In the title story, a little girl dreads being called upon to read aloud in class. All of these characters are struggling to survive, and many have left behind not only their familiar country but also lovers, spouses, parents, children, their dreams, and their dignity. There are moments of joy and passages that will make you smile, if not laugh, but also much sadness and disappointment. I found the author's spare style well-suited to these stories, and the collection as a whole shed light on those clinging to the margins of society, looking for a way in.

[icolford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The fourteen stories in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s first collection of short fiction are narrated in terse, economical prose largely shorn of lyrical embellishment. It is prose that thrusts hard and deep, its emotional impact landing with little to cushion the blow. The majority of Thammavongsa’s stories revolve around the immigrant experience: the aspirations, disappointments, the blunt-force strategies for survival that people are compelled to adopt in the struggle to adjust to unfamiliar, confusing, sometimes hostile environments. The title story, which opens the collection, describes the struggle of a school-age Laotian child to learn English. Because his wisdom is unquestioned (he is “the only one in their home who knew how to read”), she consults her father about the puzzling word “knife.” But the advice he provides is flawed, and she is humiliated in class. After this experience she sees him with new eyes, recognizing his limitations and realizing that a lonely, gruelling struggle awaits her. In “Paris,” Red, an immigrant, works shiftwork at a chicken plant and is careful to never be late. Believing herself ugly, she’s convinced that if she could only get a nose job her boss Tommy would treat her differently, and her chances for advancement would improve. But when she witnesses the shabby manner in which Tommy treats his stunningly beautiful wife, she realizes that altering her looks to conform to a glamorous ideal will accomplish nothing: “The only love Red knew was that simple, uncomplicated, lonely love one feels for oneself in the quiet moments of the day.” In “Mani Pedi,” Raymond, a failed boxer, defeated and out of options, accepts a job at his sister’s nail salon. The sister is a hard-nosed realist who had to fight for everything she has. But even in the face of her constant rebukes and unrelenting cynicism, Raymond refuses to relinquish his dreams. And in “Edge of the World,” the daughter of Laotian immigrants looks back with an aching heart to the time when her mother abandoned her. Now in her forties, she is able to see that her mother had been unable to adapt to life in a new country. Lonely and hopeless, the young woman had one day packed a suitcase and walked away, leaving her bewildered husband and helpless daughter behind. The narrator allows herself to imagine the depths of the despair that must have taken hold in order to drive her mother to such an extreme. But she is not resentful. Yes, the loss has marked her, left a gaping wound, an emotional void that she’s been unable to fill, but it also toughened her for the life she has had to live. Thammavongsa’s stories zero in on moments like this, when a character attains a stark or painful realization: that despite the hopes and dreams that refugees carry with them to a new country—despite their best efforts, years of sacrifice and valiant, honest striving—life in the real world is brutal and unfair and comes with no guarantee that the sacrifice will be rewarded. Thammavongsa’s poignant, powerful stories speak openly of this blunt, unadulterated truth.

[romonko · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Sorry Giller judges. This was a DNF for me. I got about 1/2 way through this very short book of short stories, and closed the book. I just couldn't read anymore. I've been noticing that I haven't been enjoying the newer Giller Prize books as much as I loved the first 15 or 20 of them, as I have made a point to read them all. I am not a person that usually reads short stories but I thought I should attempt to read this newest winner. Very disappointed, and I certainly don't recommend the book.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Short stories and I sometimes don't see eye to eye. Sometimes we do and I was hoping that this book of short stories that won the Giller Prize in 2020 would be one. Unfortunately, I can't say I found these stories so incredibly well written that I would recommend the book. Don't get me wrong; they were not bad, they just never quite grabbed me in the way that I think short fiction must.

The author was born to a refugee Laotian family while they were in a refugee camp in Thailand. Many of the stories chronicle the experience of Laotian immigrants in Canada (although some of the stories could be set in any first-world country). I think the story I liked the best was Mani-Pedi which is about a male who joins his sister's nail salon. He wasn't great at giving manicures but all the customers loved him and left him large tips. He fell in love with one of the white customers but it was unrequited. The story called "Randy Travis" was also quite entertaining. Thammavongsa even includes Randy Travis in the list of people that she thanks at the end.

It must be some deficit in my understanding that made me feel underwhelmed by this collection. Lots of authors whom I admire have written glowing reviews for it. So, read it and make up your own mind.

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dismal stories of immigrant life of Lao in America, often from the point of view of a child born in Southeast Asia but growing up in North America. There is beauty in the language and in the clearness of the captured lives, of tenuous survival but little hope.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The fourteen stories in this collection each turn on an awkward event or shattered aspiration in the life of an immigrant. The immigrants are all from Laos. Typically, they have gone through tremendous hardship prior to reaching north america.Their new lives are not substantially better, though at least they are no longer war-torn. And the point of view in most is that of a young daughter so that we get the contrast between the child and the parents’ take on the world.

The stories are slight, though not necessarily in a pejorative way. They are all very short. They are not complex temporally or stylistically. They typically aim for one significant observation or insight and then leave it at that. And though some of the situations are unpleasant for the characters, the stories themselves are gentle. It’s possible that some push across from slight to subtle but subtlety isn’t Thammavongsa’s strength.

Although I enjoyed the stories, I was slightly disappointed that there was no effort to go beyond the particular insight of a single, parochial, immigrant. For example, the title story turns on a father’s pronunciation of “knife” with a hard “k”. His daughter follows his example and is ridiculed at school for this, so she doubles down and insists on pronouncing it the way her father does. So far so good. But to me it seems to miss how this experience might be shared by immigrants for many different ethic groups. For example, German speakers will also tend to pronounce such words with a hard “k”. There was an opportunity here for a shared immigrant experience, something that isn’t especially unique to Laotian immigrants. But perhaps I’m wishing for the wrong thing. After all, the story works fine as it is. And fine is still good.

Gently recommended.

[lisapeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These tales of Laotian immigrants in the U.S. are spare and sad without being bleak—they're little elegies for what is given up, and the stories we tell ourselves and each other, in order to get along. Thammavongsa's use of language is quite lovely (she is a poet) and she doesn't have to hammer home the sense of her character's otherness and alienation, which makes this a gentle—if not forceful—read.

[jetangen4571 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fourteen vignettes reflecting the lives of some Laotians displaced to a new country with a difficult language, new lifestyles, the things that they expected of themselves and the different ways which others expected of them that were new and different in every way to their pasts. It's kind of a reminder to any one of us who had family who were in similar circumstances years ago and how the social isolation and longing for the way things were in their particular homeland before whatever war drove them to this new land. Well written and sometimes raw. It comes across as reality, and who's to say that some of it isn't. Dr. Siri Paiboun would have been very proud of her.
I requested and received a free ebook copy from Hachette Book Group and Little, Brown and Company via NetGalley. Thank you!

[brangwinn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I once heard a children’s chapter book writer explain that writing a picture book was hard. Getting everything you want into 32 pages that included illustrations was difficult. It is the same for a short story author. Thammavongsa is a master in delivering her first short story collection. Her stories are thoughtful capturing of life in America as a refugee. Her first story in the collection “How to Pronounce Knife” should be in every teacher’s schoolbag. Its poignant in telling what so many teachers don’t know about immigrant home life, the language and cultural differences that make school difficult. In all her stories it’s the feeling of being invisible and alienated.

[darcia_10 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

How to Pronounce Knife offers snapshots into the lives of Asian immigrants.

This is one of those rare books that I don't have much to say about. The writing is engaging and vivid, but the stories don't go anywhere. Many are like a two-minute glimpse into someone's window, giving no surrounding context, no real beginning or end, and are easily forgettable. A few, like the title story, are more insightful.

There's nothing specifically wrong with this collection of stories. I just wanted more; more substance, more emotion, more connection, more depth.

*I received a review copy from the publisher.*

[hemlokgang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I must admit to a certain level of anticipation as I began this short story collection. The Laotian author has only previously published poetry, and so I looked forward to a good use of language. These stories, all about Laotian immigrants, were deceptively simple. The struggles of children, youths, adults, and the elderly were illuminated in poignant and bittersweet tales of families and their efforts to maintain their sense of dignity and worth while trying to assimilate in a new culture. There is a sweet sadness to each story, along with some dark humor. Most notable across stories was the desire of children and young adults to spare their parents embarrassment or humiliation, whilst surviving their own trials and tribulations. I believe the author herself was born in a Laotian refugee camp, so I am going to assume that the stories are semi-autobiographical. A very good collection!