"These stories are a dark reflection of all of us, blinkered by our hang-ups and our insistent desires."–The New York Times Book Review
"The 14 stories in the book are mesmerizing, addictive. Each one is just a few pages, written in an oblique, poetic style that arrives at its conclusion through indirection. [Nors] has an uncanny ability to capture the way the human mind works, with disparate memories and ideas running simultaneously along different tracks."
–The Associated Press "[Dorthe Nors] is a master of tracking the hits and misses of human connection. If she were a surgeon, she would cut with the cleanest of lines."
–Literary Hub "Nors's deft touch gives rise to her unusual way of structuring her stories; in the hands of a less refined prose writer, it would all seem a mishmash. . . . Nors isn't interested in mere euphony, but in using language to capture ephemeral moments of being. Her tone always comes through in translation. . . . Her work is engaging on multiple levels."
–Slant Magazine "Nors is an innovator, and other innovators haunt her pages. Yet despite the deeply internal conflicts of these stories, the author successfully manages to bring the reader into the interior experience of her characters, and it is often uncomfortable, not easy to bear. . . . These are daring, untraditional stories."
–Fiction Writers Review
"Exquisite. . . . Nors is the queen of concision."
–Harvard Review "The short stories of the contemporary Danish author Dorthe Nors are a masterclass in minimalism. . . . Her works are sleek and compressed, and in them characters play hide and seek with fragments of their personhood, like shadowy figures in a darkened place, illuminated now and then by the flash of a lightning bolt."
–Hyperallergic
"With
Wild Swims, the author continues her streak of powerful flash and short fictions . . ., luring the reader with an intimate tone and a masterful handling of pace and plot construction. . . . These stories may be short in length, yet they all possess an abundance of depth."
–Words Without Borders
"[
Wild Swims] is masterful in its compression of time. . . . In these stories, love and success are always just out of grasp, while isolation, illness, and death remain constants. Nors' spare and precise prose makes these feelings of insecurity and despair so tangible that reading these stories is an unsettling experience."
–White Wall Review "Cool, razor-sharp stories by a brilliant Danish writer. . . . Irony and narrative sleights of hand (like the precisely planted out-of-place word, an obsessive thought that gets whittled down to its shameful source, the swerve of an unexpected final line) shape-shift these beautiful distilled stories."
–Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Throughout, remarkable characters and wonderful lines emerge from the artful prose. [
Wild Swims] 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
