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A dazzling return to the short story by a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.
In fourteen effervescent stories, Dorthe Nors plumbs the depths of the human heart, from desire to melancholy and everything in between. Just as she did in her English-language debut, Karate Chop, Nors slices straight to the core of the conflict in only a few pages. But Wild Swims expands the borders of her gaze, following people as they travel through Copenhagen, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and elsewhere.
Here are portraits of men and women full of restless longing, people who are often seeking a home but rarely finding it. A lie told during a fraught ferry ride on the North Sea becomes a wound that festers between school friends. A writer at a remote cabin befriends the mother of an ex-lover. Two friends knock doors to solicit fraudulent donations for the cancer society. A woman taken with the idea of wild swims ventures as far as the local swimming pool.
These stories have already been featured in the pages of New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Tin House, and A Public Space. They sound the darker tones of human nature and yet find the brighter chords of hope and humor as well. Cutting and offbeat without ever losing its warmth, Wild Swims is a master class in concision and restraint, and a path to living life without either. With Wild Swims Nors's star will continue to be ascendant.
"[R]azor-sharp...Irony and narrative sleights of hand...shape-shift these beautiful distilled stories. You think you know what you're reading until suddenly you don't...A brainy collection perfectly constructed to put you on edge." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Danish writer Nors's sensuous experimental collection offers an ethereal tour through ordinary places made strange and eerie...Throughout, remarkable characters and wonderful lines emerge from the artful prose. This is worth downing in one sitting." - Publishers Weekly
"Masterful...Nors weaves these somber tales of longing and disappointments with humor and bits of hope." - Booklist
This information about Wild Swims was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dorthe Nors is the author of Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize; So Much for That Winter; Karate Chop, the winner of the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize; and four other novels. She lives in Denmark.
Misha Hoekstra is an award-winning translator whose recent work includes the translation of Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors. He lives in Aarhus, where he writes and performs songs under the name Misha Hoist.
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