![]() ![]() Thammavongsa’s spare, rigorous stories are preoccupied with themes of alienation and dislocation, her characters burdened by the sense of existing unseen. ![]() Like her own parents, Thammavongsa’s protagonists have lost their place in the world now, in various unnamed North American cities, they are forced to invent their lives anew. In “How to Pronounce Knife,” her impressive debut story collection, her family’s arduous, yearslong journey west forms the unspoken back story of the immigrant Laotians who congregate in its pages. ![]() Souvankham Thammavongsa, a writer who has published four books of poetry, was born in a refugee camp, to Laotian parents, and raised in Toronto. But in a different time, in the aftermath of a different war - the one in Vietnam - the term evoked the more than three million people who fled Southeast Asia for a chance at a better life. Today the word “refugee” is practically synonymous with those who have fled the Syrian war and its trail of destitution. HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE Stories By Souvankham Thammavongsa ![]()
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