Wild Swims
Stories
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Danish writer Nors's sensuous experimental collection (after Mirror, Shoulder, Signal) offers an ethereal tour through ordinary places made strange and eerie. A bare-bones plot and rich, hypnotic prose sketch a portrait of a man hiding out from his wife on a hunting platform ("In a Deer Stand"). Two women's door-to-door fund-raising drive for the Cancer Society turns into a darkly ironic nightmare in "By Sydvest Station," after they encounter a sickly woman whose hair is falling out. Nors provides no clear arcs or answers, leaving the reader to contemplate ideas of perception versus objective reality as sentences cut like switchbacks on trails to mysterious destinations. In "Hygge," the title of which refers to the Danish art of coziness, the narrative is anything but: "It was as if something dead had taken up permanent residence in her cells." The surreal title story involves the narrator's trip to a local swimming pool ("It surprised me that my birthmark was still there, and still looked like the island of Anholt seen from the air"). Throughout, remarkable characters and wonderful lines emerge from the artful prose. This is worth downing in one sitting.
