Dorthe Nors is the author of the acclaimed essay collection A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast (Graywolf Press), translated by Caroline Waight.

Nors is the author of the story collections Wild Swims and Karate Chop; four novels, including Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize; and two novellas, collected in So Much for That Winter.

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This week on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Danish author Dorthe Nors. Her new book, So Much For That Winter, is available now in the United States from Graywolf Press.

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Okay, Karate Chop, 15 short stories from Denmark, and you want to be interviewed in which language, English?

Yep.

And you are aware of the fact that I’m Danish too and that two Danes having a conversation in English is pathetic. That’s the kind of thing we did when we were fourteen and hung out in places where no one knew us. Remember? We would act as if we were English and have fun with people in stores. But how old are we now, 43?

I would prefer to say 35, but between you and me—yes, 43.

“Nat Newsom”

If I were to single out one person in particular from my extensive studies of human behavior it would have to be Nat Newsom, whom I knew ten years ago, or rather ran into outside the McDonald’s I passed each day on my way to work at Columbia University. Nat Newsom opened the door for the customers of McDonald’s while rattling a plastic cup he for want of a better solution had taped to his wrist. The reason Nat more than anyone else stands out for me as special is not simply that he was able to keep his spirits up despite lacking health care and the deposit his former landlord had vanished into thin air with. That was part of it, but more specifically it was because of the paradox of Nat, genetically predisposed to naïveté as he was, lacking the very quality that characterizes the condition.