Peter Stamm is the author of the novels The Sweet
Indifference of the World, 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 forty 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 Franz Kafka,
Joseph Roth, Peter Stephan Jungk, and many others. He is the author
of several books of poems and a book of essays, Behind the Lines,
and is the editor of the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry.
In 2012 he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by
the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida and
London.
“Strong and supple sentences evocative of Camus… [with] deft
strokes of observation and insight.” —Vulture, 100 Most
Important Books of the 2000s… So Far
“Seven Years is a novel to make you doubt your own dogma. What more
can a novel do than that?” —Zadie Smith, Harper’s Magazine
“Stamm’s talent is palpable, but what makes him a writer to read,
and read often, is the way he renders contemporary life as a series
of ruptures. Never entirely sure of their position, his characters
engage in a constant effort to establish their equilibrium.” —New
York Times Book Review
“Stamm’s cleverness is to align a spareness that works in
translation with his characters’ instinctive fear of all things
rich and intense. Lean as it is, his prose is wonderfully
‘literary’ in its fine integration of voice and story. The constant
disorientation of his characters, their sense that their lives are
interchangeable with any number of other lives, seem peculiarly
suited to this era of globalization.” —The New York Review of
Books
“With a patient and impressive commitment to realism, this Swiss
novel follows the course of a complicated, troubled marriage…Though
Stamm pulls off a quietly spectacular plot twist halfway through
the book, he never loses sight of the quotidian things that erode
or transform relationships over time: an oddly personal
disagreement about the merits of ‘Rain Man’, or the ‘piles of
romance novels, Christian manuals, and Polish magazines’ that crowd
a lover’s apartment.”—The New Yorker
“Stamm is a master of quietly deliberative stories. In Seven Years,
as in the best of his work, he puts often simple-seeming character
through extraordinary paces, all the more remarkable given the
Carver-like restraint he exercises in his writing.” —Bookforum
“Seven Years is a powerful, enlightening novel about the eternal
search for contentment in life, the often fickle nature of love,
and the knowledge that in reality, happiness is rarely how we
dreamed it would be.” —The Daily Beast
“Here is Stamm’s strength, in a good English translation, the clean
uncluttered sentences that take you—as writers since Hemingway have
shown — from one crystalline point to the next, so as to travel
great distances in the shortest possible time.” —Buffalo News
“Just the kind of thing I like.”—Lorin Stein, the Paris Review
blog
“Ego, passion, and deception run wild, but the novel's strength is
found in the characters Stamm has created: powerfully imperfect,
sometimes despicable, horribly conflicted, and always believable
far beyond the archetypes that too often pop up in novels of
marital ennui.” —Publishers Weekly
“Swiss novelist Stamm (Unformed Landscape) offers a classic love
triangle that reads like a contemporary European version of Richard
Yates’s Revolutionary Road… Readers looking for a highbrow
page-turner will relish this quick read.” —Library Journal
“This touching novel is a tour of what makes love work and what
tears love apart in the modern world.” —Booklist
“A dynamic and taut novel that examines the conflicted heart in the
confines of marriage and the perception of what love is.” —ForeWord
Reviews
“Seven Years is tense and frightening—I couldn't stop plunging in.
Desire is a hunting dog and we never know what it will bring us.
This is ruthless truth.” —Rosecrans Baldwin, author of You Lost Me
There
“Peter Stamm is not alone to want to expose the tensions within
such a constellation, but the construction of his narrative is an
undeniable success.” —Le Monde
“The search for love, the pursuit of happiness, the confusion of
emotions, Peter Stamm revisits these eternal themes in an original
novel that resonates deeply with all of us.” —Elle (France)
“The cumulative emotional impact of this is quietly
shattering. How many writers have written with this degree of
brutal perceptiveness and wisdom about the indeterminate depths of
heterosexual desire? Wharton, Roth (sometimes), James Salter,
Kundera. Stamm inscribes his name on that august list” –The
Times (UK)
“Seven Years by Peter Stamm, a tale of lust and deceit...has the
makings of an existential classic, yet sows mystery without once
being opaque – it’s deliciously, deceptively easy to read.” –The
Telegraph
“[Seven Years] is cool and immensely accomplished, told
retrospectively in a way that seems to flatten suspense…while
bringing out the half-tones that shadow even the most apparently
clear-cut decisions.” –The Guardian (UK)
“Reading this novel is an experience of creeping realization as a
series of small epiphanies build up almost imperceptibly…The
novel’s cumulative effect is highly unsettling, its concluding
moments are breathtaking, and the ripples that it sets in motion
radiate in the reader’s mind long after the novel’s conversation
has ended.” –Charlotte Ryland, Times Literary Supplement
“Peter Stamm, one of Switzerland's most acclaimed writers, is at
his best exploring the complexities of human relationships.” –The
Omnivore (UK)
“Stamm has a fine sense of the pregnant moment which signals things
falling apart. By the time you get to the twist at the end, you
want to start again.” –More Intelligent Life (The Economist
Magazine)
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