Footprints in Wet Cement

Dubbed "a 20th-century Brother Grimm" (Bloomsbury Review) and "a delinquent Hans Christian Andersen" (by playwright Mark O'Donnell), Peter Wortsman is the author of work in multiple modes, including a previous book of short prose fiction, A Modern Way To Die (1991); a travel memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin, A Rhapsody in Gray (2013); and a novel, Cold Earth Wanderers (2014). He collaborated with artist Harold Wortsman on an artists' book, it-t=i (2004) and with photographer Jean-Luc Dubin on a photo essay New York, NY 1978 (2016). He is also the author of two stage plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All (2000) and Burning Words (2006), the latter produced in 2006 by the Hampshire Shakespeare Company, at the Northampton Center for the Arts, in Northampton, Mass., and again in 2014, in German translation, at the Kulturhaus Osterfeld, in Pforzheim, Germany. His short work has been widely anthologized. His travel writing has run in such major newspapers as The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and was included five years in a row in The Best Travel Writing, 2008-2012, and again in 2016. He is also a critically acclaimed translator from German into English, including Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, by Robert Musil, now in its third edition (1988, 2005, 2009); Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg (2005); Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine (2008); Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist (2010); Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm (2013); Tales of the German Imagination, From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (2013), an anthology which he also edited and annotated; and Konundrum, Selected Prose of Franz Kafka (2016), among other works. Recipient of the 1985 Beard's Fund Short Story Award, the 2008 Geertje Potash-Suhr SCALG-Prosapreis (a prize for short original fiction in German) awarded by the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year in the Solas Awards Competition, and a 2014 Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY). He was a former fellow of the Fulbright Foundation (1973), the Thomas J. Watson Foundation (1974), a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2010), and a fellow of the sterreichische Gesesellschaft fr Literatur (2016).