Fiction by Dorthe Nors, Etgar Keret, and Lydia Davis

~
Sonja is sitting in a car, and she's brought her dictionary along.  It's heavy, and sits in the bag on the backseat.  She's halfway through her translation of Gösta Svensson's latest crime novel, and the quality was already dipping with the previous one.  Now's the time I can afford it, she thought, and so she looked for driving schools online and signed up with Folke in Frederiksburg.  The theory classroom was small and blue and reeked of stale smoke and locker rooms, but the theory itself went well.  Besides Folke, there was only one other person Sonja's age in the class, and he was there because of drunk driving, so he kept to himself.  Sonja usually sat there and stuck out among all the kids, and for the first aid unit the instructor used her as a model.  He pointed to the spot on her throat where they were supposed to imagine her breathing had gotten blocked.  He did the Heimlich on her, his fingers up in her face, inside her collar, up and down her arms.  At one point he put her into a stranglehold, but that wasn't the worst of it.  The worst was when they had to do the exercises themselves.  It was humiliating to be placed in the recovery position by a boy of eighteen.  
--From Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a novel by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra (Graywolf Press, 2018).  Originally published as Spejl, skulder, blink (Gyldendal: Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016).  First published in English by Pushkin Press, London.

"What did you buy it for?"
"Because I need it," she said.  "A lot of things around here need gluing."
"Nothing around here needs gluing," I said. "I wish I understood why you buy all this stuff."
"For the same reason I married you," she murmured. "To help pass the time."
I didn't want to fight, so I kept quiet, and so did she.
--From "Crazy Glue," a very short story by Etgar Keret, LA Weekly (September 26, 2001).  It was published in his collection The Girl on the Fridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 5-7.  "Crazy Glue" was translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger.

In the summer of '76, they remodeled our house and added another bathroom.  That was my mother's private bathroom, with green tiles, white curtains, and a kind of small drawing board she could put on her knees to do crossword puzzles on.  The door of this new bathroom had no lock because it was my mother's and no one else was allowed to go in anyway.  We were very happy that summer. 
--From "The Summer of '76," a very short story by Etgar Keret, from his collection The Girl on the Fridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 169-171.  "The Summer of '76" was translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston.

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly.  She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed.  We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. 

--From "Fear," one of five very short stories by Lydia Davis, Conjunctions, Issue 24 (Spring 1995).

Minna spends her days in the Royal Library. 
Minna has to work without noise.
Minna's working on a paper sonata.
The paper sonata consists of tonal rows.
Minna writes soundless music.
Minna is a tad avant-garde.
...
It's morning.
Lars has left again.
Lars is always in a hurry to get out of bed.
The bed is a snug nest.
Minna's lying in it, but
Lars is on his bike and gone.
Lars bikes as hard as he can in the direction of City Hall Square.
Lars makes the pigeons rise.
Lars has deadlines.
--From Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, a novella by Dorthe Nors, from her book So Much for That Winter, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra (Graywolf Press, 2016).  Part of Minna Needs Rehearsal Space (Minna mangler et øvelokale) was published in English and Danish by Asymptote.