Pick a Color
Pick a Color
Review Quotes: " Pick a Color, the taut, tricksy novel by Laotian-Canadian writer Souvankham Thammavongsa...is a feat of economy...Under 200 pages, [it] punches above its weight. Thammavongsa's minimalism conveys a...
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Review Quotes: "Pick a Color is another example of all the things that make Thammavongsa's craft shine: its airtight form, soulful characterization, and the evocative portrayal of the mundane...The novel quietly burns with the power of human love and friendship." -- Electric LiteratureReview Quotes: "Cooly observant novel, by a noted short-story writer...With dark humor and brief touches of tenderness, Thammavongsa's tableau of working-class life casts stock elements--a damaged narrator, a workforce composed entirely of nonwhite women--in an alienating glow."-- The New Yorker Review Quotes: "Superb...The steady-paced, often mordantly funny Pick a Color explores the immigrant experience, the long tail of trauma, the indignities suffered by low-wage workers and their companion emotions: loneliness, loss and grief."-- Wall Street Journal Publisher Marketing: WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE A USA Today Bestseller From O. Henry Award winner and two-time Giller Prize winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class, an intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name. "I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name 'Susan.'" 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. Review Citations:
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Author: Thammavongsa, Souvankham
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Binding: Hardcover
Pub Date: 2025-09-30
BISAC: Fiction / Asian American & Pacific Islander|Fiction / Cultural Heritage|Fiction / Family Life / General
Subjects: Immigrants|Asian Americans|Self-actualization (Psychology)|Loneliness|Identity (Psychology)|Manicuring|Domestic fiction|Novels|Women boxers
Weight: 0.65 lbs
ISBN: 9780316422147
ASIN: -
SKU: SP-9780316422147
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