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 “Susan.” (“None of our clients notice,” says Ning.) She treats the salon like a boxing ring, guided by the work ethic that her coach drilled into her: “Don’t you go looking for their pity. Pity don’t pay.”
Ning appears to have endured past hardship. For unspecified reasons, she is missing her left ring finger. But Ning makes the best of her nine remaining digits. She is proudly single and figures that she will never need to accommodate a wedding band anyway. (“I am alone because I want to be,” she says.) Having a gap between her middle and pinkie fingers also makes Ning a better technician: There is “more space to perch a client’s toe or fingernail to paint.”
The juxtaposition between Ning’s rugged hands and those that she buffs and oils forms the basis for Pick a Color’s scrutiny of interclass dynamics. Many of Ning’s clients don’t even realize that she is missing a finger. “To notice that, you have to be looking at me,” Ning says during one interaction with a client. “She knows the nail color she wants, her friends, where to sit, where to pay. She even notices the street outside. The time. But not me.”
To counterbalance the rudeness, entitlement, indifference, and occasional sexual harassment that they encounter, Ning and the Susans gossip throughout the day in “our language.” The technicians offer crude live commentary about the six-figure salaries, private school tuition, and maybe-cheating husbands that unsuspecting clients ramble about in English. “They come for the talk,” Ning says. “And you’d be surprised what people tell you when they think you are a stranger and they are never going to see you again.”
Ning makes fun of clients she thinks have funny names, such as a woman named Eileen. (“Eye-lean. It makes me think of my optometrist.”) Customer Vanessa, who goes by Van, is not spared either. (“I didn’t think anyone wanted to be called anything like a vehicle.”) Ning also has opinions on the idea of “self-care” that brings so many people into her salon: “I don’t like that term,” she says. “It’s more like my-care. I’m the one sitting here, doing all the caring.”
Thammavongsa never reveals which language Ning and her colleagues speak, or where exactly the nail salon is located. She only drops subtle hints, mentioning transactions in dollars, a client who is a baseball player, and a “little taco place a few doors down.” But perhaps that relative ubiquity is the point: The fact that Ning’s nail salon could be anywhere in North America is what makes Pick a Color all the more unsettling.—Allison Meakem
Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories
Bora Chung, trans. Anton Hur (Algonquin Books, 208 pp., $18.99, September 2025)
In Bora Chung’s Midnight Timetable, the horrors are almost beside the point. Never mind the sheep with gaping surgical wounds or the cursed sneaker that threatens to squash a miniature version of its wearer. The Institute that houses these haunted objects is a reprieve from the real world for many of its employees.
“It’s not that there were no strange things happening whatsoever,” one worker, who was previously forced to undergo conversion therapy and cast out by a family of religious zealots, tells another character. “It’s just that my life has always been full of strange things.”
His remark gets at the heart of Chung’s novel made up of a series of ghost stories, elegantly translated by Anton Hur. Rendered in taut and restrained prose and inspired by Korean and Slavic literature, these stories are replete with undead cats, stairs that lead to imaginary halls, and satin fabric that is haunted by the horrors that Kaya noble families faced at the hands of the Silla in 6th-century Korea.
The Institute and its objects provide the scaffolding for Chung’s elaborate tales of human greed, grudges, and violence. As the narrator remarks after recounting the paranormal events that tore apart a man’s life, “that’s where a completely different and a much more ordinary type of family story began, one that is not a ghost story, but perhaps the scariest story of all.” The overall effect is as riotous as it is unsettling.
Chung, whose short story collection Cursed Bunny was short-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, once said in an interview that when she writes, she leans on the principle: “When in doubt, go against logic and/or common sense.” It’s not a bad strategy, in a world as nonsensical as ours. Midnight Timetable does what the best of horror, sci-fi, and other genre writing can achieve: It renders our present realities strange again.—Chloe Hadavas
September Releases, In Brief
E.Y. Zhao’s debut novel, Underspin, pieces together the tragic life of a table tennis wunderkind. Indian novelist Kiran Desai provides a literary love story for our globalized world with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. In Nathan Harris’s Amity, two formerly enslaved siblings traverse the postbellum U.S. South and deserts of Mexico. Mia Couto’s The Cartographer of Absences, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, traces the collapse of Mozambique’s colonial regime. In Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, a young woman in Tokyo turns to surrogacy to make ends meet.
British literary juggernaut Ian McEwan’s 18th novel, What We Can Know, forays into speculative fiction in 22nd-century England. Good and Evil and Other Stories, the latest collection by National Book Award-winning Argentine author Samanta Schweblin, is translated into English by Megan McDowell. A young man navigates life and love in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon in Lilas Taha’s Waseem. In Defne Suman’s The Last Apartment in Istanbul, seven decades of Turkish politics are told through the eyes of one Greek man. And Italian Mexican writer Fabio Morábito’s short story collection, The Shadow of the Mammoth, is translated into English by Curtis Bauer.—CH
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