Published in 2014 (first published 2008)
104 pages
Dorthe Nors, is a Danish author and writer. She is the first Danish author to be published in the American magazine The New Yorker. She was born in 1970 and studied literature and art history at the University of Aarhus. After publishing three novels, she wrote Karate Chop, her collection of short stories, in 2008 and Minna Needs Rehearsal Space in 2013. She has seen her short stories in various publications, including The Boston Review, Harpers and The New Yorker, and has contributed to anthologies in Denmark and Germany. Having international acclaim, she lives in rural Jutland, Denmark.
What is this book about?
Karate Chop, Dorthe Nors’s acclaimed story collection, is the debut book in the collaboration between Graywolf Press and A Public Space. These fifteen compact stories are meticulously observed glimpses of everyday life that expose the ominous lurking under the ordinary. While his wife sleeps, a husband prowls the Internet, obsessed with female serial killers; a bureaucrat tries to reinvent himself, exposing goodness as artifice when he converts to Buddhism in search of power; a woman sits on the edge of the bed where her lover lies, attempting to locate a motive for his violence within her own self-doubt. Shifting between moments of violence (real and imagined) and mundane contemporary life, these stories encompass the complexity of human emotions, our capacity for cruelty as well as compassion. Not so much minimalist as stealthy, Karate Chop delivers its blows with an understatement that shows a master at work.
