Review

“A kind of parable…simple and haunting.” —New York Review of Books

“Agnes is a moody, unsettled, and elusive little fable—and it’s always interesting.” —Wall Street Journal

“A haunting psychological study.” —The New Yorker

“A provocative and mesmerizing book.” —Publishers Weekly

“An urgent and unsettling read.” —Library Journal

“This short novel should appeal to readers enchanted by [Stamm’s] elliptical style…an extended meditation on the interrelationship between life and fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews

“This tale moves briskly and plausibly toward the dark conclusion it announces at the outset. Stamm manages to dramatize the truism that writers become caught up in the world their words create, that readers become enamored of characters in fiction, and both mourn when characters suffer…gripping…unsettling.” —Booklist

About the Author

Peter Stamm is the author of the novels All Days Are Night, Seven Years, On a Day Like This, and Unformed Landscape, and the short-story collections We’re Flying and In Strange Gardens and Other Stories. His prize-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, and Where Have You Been? Selected Essays in 2014. He lives in Florida and London.