The characters in Stamm’s generous new collection engage right away via their seeming transparency. No sense of author omniscience separates the reader from protagonists coping with issues large (the death of a spouse) or small (a bandage put on too tight). Often, issues begin as small annoyances that develop menacingly. In the title story, a day-care worker becomes increasingly frustrated when she’s forced to stay with a young charge whose affluent parent fails to pick him up. In the surprising “Children of God,” a young clergyman struggling to gain a foothold in his new rural parish encounters a pregnant woman who claims that she’s a virgin. “The Natural Way of Things” opens with the highly effective tease: “I’m not saying that they tricked us, said Alice, but they didn’t tell us the truth.” Stamm finds variety in setting and with characters of differing ages and social classes, and by writing in first, second, and third person in both past and present tense. More significantly, he connects so closely to the psyches of these individuals that his style becomes mutable, variously suggesting the eerie claustrophobia of Shirley Jackson, the brittle edge of Raymond Carver, and even the warmth of Lorrie Moore. Agent: Eva Koralnik, the Liepman Literary Agency. (Aug.)
"While revealing the limits of our existence, knowledge, and language, the stories are simultaneously haunting and uplifting. A master storyteller, Stamm succeeds in stripping away layers of superficiality to uncover the complicated daily psychological struggle of the average person." –World Literature Today
"The situations depicted in Stamm’s We’re Flying...evoke the negative spaces of Raymond Carver or the quiet menace of Shirley Jackson, but with Walser’s light touch." –Seattle Times
“Peter Stamm’s stories are incisively pared down, as if he cuts through the surface of things: everything is peeled open, apparent, naked... Each story is intriguing like a complex piece of machinery where you can see everything even if you don't understand how it works.” –Tessa Hadley, author of Married Love and The London Train
“Stamm finds variety in setting and with characters of differing ages and social classes, and by writing in first, second, and third person in both past and present tense. More significantly, he connects so closely to the psyches of these individuals that his style becomes mutable, variously suggesting the eerie claustrophobia of Shirley Jackson, the brittle edge of Raymond Carver, and even the warmth of Lorrie Moore.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Many of Stamm’s characters seem perplexed about what life is, yet what life might be about or how to live it are questions they would never think to ask. The slightest indispositions overwhelm them. Stamm builds these half-lives in declarative sentences, and Hofmann’s translation has a terse exactness. A [character] offers this: 'A feeling has no nose, no cheeks, no mouth. You can’t trust your feelings, they’re too inexact.' Stamm’s great gift is to let feelings remain unspoken.” –Booklist
“The 22 stories in Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s We’re Flying intimately explore the peaks and valleys of his characters’ often solitary passions and obsessions.” –Elle
“ Beneath the surface placidity of Swiss life, undercurrents of spiritual turmoil and existential despair charge this powerful collection of provocative stories...Renowned in European literary circles, Switzerland’s Stamm didn’t achieve his stateside critical breakthrough until his last novel (Seven Years, 2011, etc.). This story collection is even better, with pieces that read like the Zurich equivalent of Camus or Kafka, occasionally laced with a bit of Ibsen or Ingmar Bergman…For those who have an affinity for metaphysical fiction written with a surgeon’s precision, this collection will spur readers to seek out everything else by its author.” –Kirkus (starred review)
“These tautly constructed stories, with echoes of such disparate authors as Patricia Highsmith and Anton Chekhov, take root in the psyche and will not let you go” –Library Journal
"The achievement of this collection...is not a small one. The style evokes absurdity, but the stories themselves are saved from being absurd. It is not always courageous to simply tour through life’s moments of futility and failure. Stamm examines these moments with the riskier project of exploring the messy humanity exposed therein. He invites us to recognize ourselves there—and to do so without shame." –The Rumpus
"So, so good. I heartily recommend this book, Stamm is a master at work and the collection will delight and startle in equal measure." –Alex in Leeds
"We’re Flying is eerily readable—perhaps due to how much of ourselves we recognize in his characters. In a varied and colorful array of stories, Stamm manages to portray human life as the emotional mishmash that it really is, full of misery and beauty, full of falling and flying." –Three Percent
"I think [Stamm] is one of those rare writers whose words haunt his readers long after you put his books down." –Yiyun Li, Wall Street Journal (Asia)
"It is difficult not to find yourself in many of these stories...The result is an effortless accumulation of small gestures that furnish the spaces in which the understanding of ourselves and others becomes possible..." –Full Stop
"Stamm is a true artist here, and his stories require the reader to really listen. He asks you to see and hear his characters deeply...He has a knack for effortless symbolism, but he dodges any sense of intentional drama or sentimentality. Walk through these places, and delight in Stamm’s sure and unabated guidance." –Propeller
"While revealing the limits of our existence, knowledge, and language, the stories are simultaneously haunting and uplifting. A master storyteller, Stamm succeeds in stripping away layers of superficiality to uncover the complicated daily psychological struggle of the average person. Michael Hofmann, award-winning translator of Kafka, Joseph Roth, and many others, deserves credit for his emotionally taut translation of the volume from German into English." - World Literature Today
In his latest, Swiss writer Stamm (Seven Years) offers the reader insights into the human character, sometimes discomfiting and seemingly irrational but at the same time oddly familiar. A husband faced with his wife's probable slow death follows the hospital's instructions by packing a suitcase with items that his wife will clearly never use and then has no idea what to do with the suitcase. A writer looking for a quiet sanctuary to complete a work in progress takes a room in an abandoned hotel with no electrical power or running water and in which dinner consists of unheated, canned ravioli. A middle-aged, childless couple, worn down by habitual communication, find themselves confronted with a disruptive, ill-behaved family in the neighboring villa while on summer holiday and find themselves strangely aroused. VERDICT These tautly constructed stories, with echoes of such disparate authors as Patricia Highsmith and Anton Chekhov, take root in the psyche and will not let go.—Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA
Beneath the surface placidity of Swiss life, undercurrents of spiritual turmoil and existential despair charge this powerful collection of provocative stories. Renowned in European literary circles, Switzerland's Stamm didn't achieve his stateside critical breakthrough until his last novel (Seven Years, 2011, etc.). This story collection is even better, with pieces that read like the Zurich equivalent of Camus or Kafka, occasionally laced with a bit of Ibsen or Ingmar Bergman. Not a lot happens in these stories and what does mainly takes place internally, in the psyches of characters who don't seem to have much control over their destinies or understanding of their motives and whose essential mysteries--to themselves and to the reader--could be described as the human condition. The American publication combines two separate story collections, the first published in 2008, the second in 2011, yet the stories themselves are timeless, like fables or parables, with the plainspoken translation reinforcing the stark, spare essence of the fiction. Some of these stories deal with the awkwardness of adolescence and sexual initiation, but the protagonists of many more are innocents as well. In "Children of God," the longest story here, a minister navigates between sin and divinity as he falls in love with a young girl who insists that her pregnancy is an immaculate conception. In the process, he consults a doctor, one who was "not even an atheist, he believed in nothing, not even that there was no God." The following story, "Go Out into the Fields...," concerns a landscape artist--identified in the second person as "you"--who learned to paint when "you learned to see," who "kept painting dusks, as if you wanted to stop time, to escape the certainty of death," and who approaches his work with "a passionate indifference." Another protagonist, a young girl who lives "In the Forest," survives through "alert indifference." Such a perspective might be considered Zurich Zen, and Stamm is its master. For those who have an affinity for metaphysical fiction written with a surgeon's precision, this collection will spur readers to seek out everything else by its author.
