THE YEAR 2014 SAW the publication of Peter Stamm's complete stories in Der Lauf der Dinge: Gesammelte Erzählungen (The Natural Way of Things: Collected Stories). The volume reproduces the Swiss writer's four collections—Blitzeis (Black Ice, 1999), In fremden Gärten (In Strange Gardens, 2003), Wir fliegen (We’re Flying, 2008) and Seerücken (The Ridge, 2011)—as well as pieces published independently and previously unpublished tales. Stamm is also an acclaimed novelist—most recently Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt (2018; The Sweet Indifference of the World, 2020)—however, the appearance of Der Lauf der Dinge (named after a story in Seerücken) confirms Stamm as a short-story specialist to whose work the form is central. Notably, he is among relatively few German-language short-story writers to enjoy success in translation. In English, his stories have appeared in versions by the leading translator Michael Hofmann, with Blitzeis and In fremden Gärten appearing in the single volume In Strange Gardens and Other Stories (2011) and both Wir fliegen and Seerücken as We’re Flying (2013).

Even in the buoyant German-language market for short stories, the publication of an edition of collected stories is a relatively rare occurrence for a living author. It makes a particular claim for the significance of a body of work, whether in terms of the development of an author's craft or the contribution to the short story as a literary genre. The appearance of Stamm's complete stories as his most recent short-story volume to date invites us to range freely across his wider output. The chapter contends that as a collection of stories, the “collected edition” or “complete stories” throws into striking relief a question that applies to all short-story collections. This is the question of how one reads a set of stories in a volume and of how varied ways of reading make different sense of the stories and their relation to one another, and to a wider whole.