Walking the city: The New York stories of Peter Stamm

This article examines the Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s New York stories as a case study of the relation between city space and the short story form. Drawing on the theories of Michel de Certeau, for whom walking and telling stories opens up routes through the city in analogy to the linguistic speech act, it shows how Stamm’s stories open out New York as a kaleidoscope of experienced, imagined and remembered spaces and also offer the basis of an approach more widely applicable to the city-based short story.