Story/Teller

Story/Teller: Wild Swims with Dorthe Nors, Merritt Wever, and Brigid Hughes

Wednesday, 6:00 pm EDT February 3, 2021

Online via Zoom

The event will open with a dramatic reading of a story from Dorthe Nors’s Wild Swims: Stories by Emmy Award-winning actor Merritt Wever. After the performance, Brigid Hughes, founding editor of literary magazine A Public Space, will interview Nors on the collection.

Written with the same darkly comic concision her fans love, stories from Wild Swims have already been featured in the New Yorker, Harper’s magazine, Tin House, and A Public Space, ahead of its February 2, 2021, paperback release. Nors’s Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.

Co-presented with A Public Space and The Consulate General of Denmark in New York.

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In Conversation

Dorthe Nors

Dorthe Nors

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.
Merritt Wever

Merritt Wever

Merritt Wever has appeared in such feature films as Birdman, Righteous Kill, Into The Wild, Michael Clayton, Tough (‘Best Actor’ award, First Run Film Festival), Greenberg, and Tiny Furniture. Most recently she was seen in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Her television credits include the Netflix limited series Unbelievable (Golden Globe Nomination), Godless (Emmy Award, Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie), Nurse Jackie (Emmy Award, Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy), The Walking Dead, New Girl, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Most recently she was seen starring in HBO’s Run. Her theater appearances include The Nether, Uncle Vanya (2012 Joe A. Calloway Award), The Illusion, Sam & Lucy, Bad Girls, Smashing, and Touch(ed).

She is a graduate of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts.
Brigid Hughes

Brigid Hughes

Brigid Hughes is the editor of A Public Space, the literary and arts magazine, and A Public Space Books. She lives in New York City.

Featured Book

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Wild Swims

By Dorthe Nors

Published by Graywolf Press

Translated by Misha Hoekstra

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.

Co-Presenters

A Public Space is an independent nonprofit publisher of an eponymous award-winning literary, arts, and culture magazine, and A Public Space Books. Under the direction of founding editor Brigid Hughes since 2006, it has been our mission to seek out overlooked and unclassifiable work, and to publish writing from beyond established confines.

The Consulate General of Denmark in New York is Denmark’s official representation in New York and across the East Coast, advising and assisting in a number of areas: consular, commercial, investment, cultural, and press.

About this series

Story/Teller

Our Story/Teller series features actors reading from new works of fiction to give audiences a taste of the language, characters, and story, followed by moderated conversations with the authors.

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