The Author Events Series presents Souvankham Thammavongsa | Pick a Color: A Novel
In Conversation with Laura McGrath
Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer’s day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.
As the day’s work grinds on, the friction between Ning’s two identities–as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances–will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.
Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Color confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa’s place as literature’s premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.
Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and was raised and educated in Toronto, where she now lives. How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN America Open Book Award. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, and NOON.
Laura McGrath is Assistant Professor of English at Temple University. Her writing on books, data, and the publishing industry has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her first book, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and will be published in April by Princeton University Press.
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