Wild Swims: Stories

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. (Feb.)