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.

多爾特•諾爾斯（Dorthe Nors, 1970— ）

丹麥女作傢，當代丹麥語文學寫作的代錶人物。齣生於日德蘭半島，畢業於奧鬍斯大學文學與藝術史專業。在成為職業作傢之前，多年從事翻譯工作，譯介瞭大量瑞典懸疑作品。現已齣版五部長篇小說和兩部短篇集。是第一位作品刊登在《紐約客》上的丹麥作傢。2017年憑藉《索尼婭的駕駛課》入圍國際布剋奬決選。諾爾斯的作品以用詞精確，深諳人性，善於捕捉稍縱即逝的細膩感觸，用剋製的黑色幽默還原都市人的復雜內心而著稱。