We’re Flying, an excellent new collection of short stories by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, is the author’s eighth book to appear in English. As with Stamm’s previous works, it is the poet and essayist Michael Hofmann who handles the translation, a task I imagine to be both more complex and more straightforward than Hofmann’s other translation projects (Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Thomas Bernhard). This is because Stamm is one of the leading new voices from Europe, but his sharp and unadorned prose is very different from what we might usually expect from contemporary European fiction.
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