Peter Wortsman

First published in 1991, and now issued in a second edition, comprising short short fictions most written in the eighties, A Modern Way to Die by Peter Wortsman, "predates the in-vogue term flash fiction, but it's surely one of the cornerstones of the tradition," (according to short form pioneer Peter Cherches). As Wortsman notes in the book's original foreword, these texts appeared "in the absence of big things to say [...] guided only by the precarious...

16-year-old Elgin Marble has had enough of a world that is decidedly vertical. When his father, an upstanding elevator man, is marked for disposal, Elgin joins an underground group called the Crabs. This illicit group tirelessly digs tunnels in the hope of one day breaking through to the outside. But who are the Crabs, and can they be trusted? Elgin's mother, Ellen, is worried sick about her son. The ruthless school principal, Mr. Orion, warns her...

In the short personal essays that comprise Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim, Essays in lieu of a Memoir, author Peter Wortsman, best known for his original prose fiction and stage plays, and his translations from the German, follows in the footsteps of French essayist Michel de Montaigne, taking stock of life in middle age. His perspectives, including childhood fear, chronic insomnia, ironing a shirt, getting a haircut, having a skin cancer removed,...

These Footprints in Wet Cement are just that: stories some experienced, some homespun, some dredged from the fertile detritus of dreams; impressions gathered and ruminations fermented over the past decade or so the fleeting imprint of a life left to harden in the tenuous mold of language. Straddling the tenuous borderline between the narrative and the poetic, they are all the product of a pressed aesthetic. To borrow from the foreword: "An atom of...