A new story collection from "one of Europe's most exciting writers" (New York Times Book Review) deftly evokes and explores the shifts that occur when the world grows dark.
Georg is on the verge of retirement. No one notices him anymore at the office, and there is no dinner waiting for him at home. He seems to dissolve slowly and a nameless horror seizes him.
Sabrina is flattered when an artist approaches her. But when she sees herself as a work of art for the first time, she shudders.
David wants to rob a bank. He already has a mask for the purpose, but he won't be using it today. He's heard that bank robbers often study the scene for weeks before they strike. So he's started to lurk.
We think we know our world, but then the familiar suddenly turns strange, and even frightening. In these powerfully affecting, minutely constructed stories, Peter Stamm illustrates how fragile our reality really is, how susceptible to tricks of the heart and mind. Praise for Peter Stamm:
"Stamm's prose (beautifully translated by Michael Hofmann) is plain but not so simple...A subtle but deadly style." -Zadie Smith
"Peter Stamm is an extraordinary author who can make the ordinary absolutely electrifying...Hard to recommend too highly." -Tim Parks
"A master writer...His prose...is as sharply illuminating as a surgical light." -The Economist Peter Stamm is the author of the novels To the Back of Beyond, All Days Are Night, Seven Years, On a Day Like This, Unformed Landscape, and Agnes, and the short-story collections We're Flying and In Strange Gardens and Other Stories. His award-winning books have been translated into more than thirty languages. For his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction, he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. He lives in Switzerland.
Michael Hofmann has translated the work of Gottfried Benn, Hans Fallada, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and many others. In 2012 he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His Selected Poems was published in 2009, Where Have You Been? Selected Essays in 2014, and One Lark, One Horse: Poems in 2019. He lives in Florida and London.
