Peter Wortsman
The son of Austrian-Jewish emigrés, born in New York in 1952, Peter Wortsman was raised bilingually in German and English, i.e. linguistically confused. He is the author of a novel (Cold Earth Wanderers, 2014), two volumes of short fiction (A Modern Way to Die, 1991, second edition, 2019; and Footprints in Wet Cement, 2017), plays (Burning Words, premiered in 2006, in German translation, 2014; and The Tattooed Man Tells All, 2018), a travel memoir (Ghost Dance in Berlin, 2013), and of a book of nonfiction (The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard, 2019). Wortsman is also a literary translator from German into English, of works by Chamisso, the Grimms, Heine, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kafka, Kleist, Musil, and Mynona, among others.