This month, we’re getting to know the employees of a fictional North American nail salon and a Korean research center for haunted objects.
Pick a Color: A Novel
Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown and Company, 192 pp., $28, September 2025)
If Lao Canadian writer Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut novel were a play, it would be a relatively simple production. Pick a Color takes place over the course of one day at a nail salon that is presumably in a Canadian or U.S. metropolitan area and features a small cast of characters—no set or costume changes required. Against this basic backdrop, the nail technicians make observations about race, class, and labor. The salon becomes a laboratory for them to push the limits of deceptively rigid North American social norms.
The protagonist and narrator of Pick a Color is Ning, a 41-year-old retired boxer who is now the proprietor of a nail salon called Susan’s. Although Ning’s employees have their own names—Annie, Mai, and Noi—all four of them wear name tags that simply read “S
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