![]() ![]() ![]() The majority of the stories concern family life in an unnamed North American city told from the perspective of a Laotian child or adolescent. She arrived to literacy late, and would state in an interview “I never read stories about people like my parents.” This, her fiction debut, is all about people like her parents. When she was still a child, a couple sponsored her family’s move to Canada, where she grew up. Thammavongsa, author of four poetry books, was born in a Laos refugee camp in Thailand in 1978. This navigation is the theme of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s fine collection of short stories. ![]() It’s an authorial trick that serves as a motif for how immigrants navigate their way through a strange new language and, with it, a strange new culture. The title story of How to Pronounce Knife hinges on the pronunciation of the silent k. But the way a phoneme is pronounced can contain a world of information about a speaker’s race, nationality and social status. A phoneme is a single sound, the smallest unit of language. ![]()
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