“a mixed candybag of strange, imaginative and entertaining texts … what a wonderful geyser of fantastical stories this is! The Argentinian literary giant Jorge Luis Borges called his transformative stories ‘fictions’ and that’s spot on when it comes to Hiorthøy’s absurd, beautiful, grotesque, fairy-tale like stories …. It’s done in such a playful way”
6/6 stars
Stein Roll, Adresseavisen, Norway
“Hiorthøy hits the bull’s eye. It’s the smartness and originality that is the distinguishing feature of most of what Kim Hiorthøy writes … The pieces are often built up as conversations between two or more people in stories that take off in any direction, without paragraphs or pauses, guided by the imagination, the absurd, the surrealistic and the accidental. It’s playful, inventive, to the point, ironic and above all incredibly fun … a deeply original and entertaining work that plays with language and composition in a way we rarely see in Norwegian literature. It’s quite simply a great read”
Oddmund Hagen, Dag og Tid
“Wonder, eeriness and games are at the core of Kim Hiorthøy’s clever stories and illustrations … Things happen in these stories. Strange things, frightening things, awful things … Small does of weird eeriness, written in a tone and a register that indicates that this is the most natural thing in the world. Everyday realism from a parallel reality. An inquisitive game with the narration as the story ties the texts together … A bit of David Lynch, a bit of Jorge Louis Borges, a bit of Vladimir Nabokov, but still something different from all three. The result is a playground for the mind, a free space for the imagination”
Leif Bull, Dagens Næringsliv D2
“A liberating game in the outer areas of storytelling. With the confidence of a master, Kim Hiorthøy transports us from elementary thoughts on the nature of storytelling to questions of what will happen if we don’t pick up the chocolate we drop on the floor … If there’s one thing Hiorthøy knows how to do, it’s this: Write stories that don’t want to play on the biggest strings, but that get close to individuals and situations – and let the smallest things reverberate in everyday life … There’s something very easygoing in these little stories, and that’s precisely what makes it possible to question in a fundamental way our surroundings and what we work with”
Hanna Malene Lindberg, BLA
