Description
Fiction. 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 optimism of the pen." Conceived as a disjointed compendium of narrative treatments of life’s common denominator, death, the book's spare hit and run aesthetic gravitates from enhanced neon hyperrealist reportage to nightmare parable to plummet the surreal substrata of the American Dream.
Author Bio
Peter Wortsman is the author of works of fiction (A Modern Way to Die, Cold Earth Wanders, Footprints in Wet Cement, and Stimme und Atem/Out of Breath, Out of Mind); stage plays produced in the U.S. and Europe (Burning Words, The Tattooed Man Tells All); a travel-memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin, for which he won an Independent Publishers Book Award; a book of physicians' profiles (The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard); and an anthology, Tales of the German Imagination, which he compiled, translated and edited). He has also translated numerous texts from the German, including works by Peter Altenberg, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Musil and Mynona). Wortsman was a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA