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The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Quantum Sarah on Peter Stamm’s new collection of stories, We’re Flying, which came out from Other Press in Michael Hofmann’s translation earlier this year.

Peter Stamm has a number of books available in English translation, including Seven Years, which was on last year’s Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist.

Quantum Sarah was a spectacular summer intern who is not back in school, but will likely be reviewing for us again in the not-too-distant future. Here’s the opening of her review:

In his new collection We���Ĵ�ý�re Flying, Swiss author Peter Stamm weaves together a multitude of perspectives with the ghostly fiber of loss. This fascinating set of short stories centers around the general theme of the ���Ĵ�ý�human condition���Ĵ�ý�—joy and sadness, birth and death, couples and families, work and school. However, a generous majority of these tales unfold against a subconscious background of grief, whether real or imagined: the widow that learns posthumously of her husband���Ĵ�ý�s affair; the toddler abandoned by his parents at preschool; the frustrated artist. Yet the book isn���Ĵ�ý�t a blurred mess of sympathy; rather, it���Ĵ�ý�s a sharp analysis of life���Ĵ�ý�s chronic pain and beauty. Precise, disquieting, and high-impact, Stamm���Ĵ�ý�s new collection slices away surface tissue to reveal the downright messiness of human life

Stamm���Ĵ�ý�s stories are surprisingly fleshed-out with minimum verbage. Like the artist in one of his stories, Stamm writes surgically: ���Ĵ�ý�You paint what you see with the maximum of precision, but you don���Ĵ�ý�t care about the precision of the depiction . . . What counts is decisiveness.���Ĵ�ý� His characters are quickly but sharply sketched; his story-world is modeled on the one at hand, but as though seen through a microscope, with fine-grained crystals of detail. Stamm shows, instead of tells—in ���Ĵ�ý�Sweet Dreams,���Ĵ�ý� a newly-cohabiting girl reflects on the meaning of family while imagining an old black-and-white photo of relatives.

Click here to read the entire review.