Bøger af Peter Wortsman

Ravens in Berlin . . . Parakeets in Brooklyn . . . Chickensin Tel Aviv . . . Spiders in Cognac. City creatures spark the imagination andintellect in words and art by this father-daughter team. Odd Birds & Fat Cats (An Urban Bestiary) is anillustrated collection of brief observations on city creatures. Inspiredby the tradition of the medieval bestiary, bestiarum vocabulum, a12th-century bestselling genre that chronicled animals and beings bothreal and fantastical, the book features pithy impressions of birds and animalsthat delight, confound, and edify, written by Peter Wortsman, coupledwith detailed naturalist artwork by his daughter, AurélieBernard Wortsman.Featured creatures include:Pigeons: “When, finally, it takes flight . . . thisasphalt-colored bird is like a piece of the pavement which by some fluke ofgravity broke loose and is foolishly falling upward by mistake." Seagulls: “Fallen splinters of eternity, they hangoverhead with the equanimity and mild disdain of angels in a medievalaltarpiece, and unlike pigeons, refuse any direct contact with man."Ants: “Micro-managers in three-piece bodies,ants parody human antics to a tee. Or is it the other way around?"Dust mites: “Every time you scratch yourself or combyour hair, you are feeding the tiny intruders with the detritus of self."With four-color images throughout, printed in a beautiful hardboundedition, this one-of-a-kind volume will please the discerning animal lover,traveler, art lover, iconoclast, and literati on your gift list—and, of course,also you!

Like driftwood, words, phrases and severed sentences come floating by. Part fisherman, part scavenger, I spread my net and rescue these bits of debris from the deep. I can't say why certain severed statements catch my eye. Floating fragments of meaning, they sparkle and speak to me. And by a peculiar lure beyond my conscious ken, they sometimes come together. The pairings are not always opportune. Some sniff at each other's nether parts in passing, as dogs do, and promptly part in pursuit of other more enticing scents. But on occasion something clicks. This is my second published assemblage of such felicitous couplings. Some readers may relish the result. If not, just toss it back into the tide.

Like a farmer rotating his crops, Peter Wortsman periodically ploughs words back into the mulch of meaning. Romanian émigré DADA poet Tristran Tzara (aka Samuel Rosenstock, 1896-1963) gave it a name: cut-up (or "découpé" in French). Wortsman reverts to cutups when he's too distracted, depressed, dumbfounded or deranged to write in the regular manner. As the isolation of virtual lockdown during the seemingly interminable Covid-19 pandemic stretches into its third year, Wortsman, a modern-day monk, languishes in the solitude of his cell, longing for meaningful communion. Absent belief in a transcendent being, cutups take the place of prayer.

Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere was and is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located directly on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity and haven of the avant-garde in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, only to be reduced in 1945 to a divided rubble heap, subsequently revived in a schizoid state of post-World War II duality, and reunited in 1989 when the wall came tumbling down — Berlin has since been reborn yet again as the hipster hub of the 21st century. This book is a hopscotch tour in time and space.Part memoir, part travelogue, Ghost Dance in Berlin is an unlikely declaration of love, as much to a place as to a state of mind, by the American-born son of German-speaking Jewish refugees. Peter Wortsman’s fluency in German makes the text resound in eerie stereo. The winter of 2010 was so cold, he literally walked on water. From his perch in a lavish villa on Berlin’s biggest lake, he imagines the parallel celebratory haunting of two sets of ghosts, those of the exiled erstwhile owners, a Jewish banker and his family, and those of the Führer’s Minister of Finance and his entourage, who took over title, while in another villa across the lake another gaggle of ghosts is busy planning the Final Solution. Where a wall once stood dividing East and West the city remains bisected by invisible borderlines, back and forth across which the author blithely hops, with an eye, an ear and a tongue for telling detail. The text is studded with accounts of memorable conversations and encounters with a garrulous cabbie, a Michelin star chef, street musicians, winos, lawyers, bankers, politicians, and a hooker, with cameo appearances by Henry Kissinger and the ghost of Marlene Dietrich.And when spring erupts and Berlin finally bursts out of hibernation, Wortsman’s scintillating account of the celebration of the urban impulse is punctuated by, among other phenomena, trees shedding pods that look like snow, a bungee jumper leaping from the roof of a hotel, youth amassed to block a neo-Nazi march, and the first ever sighting of Siamese twin ladybugs.

In Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim, essays in lieu of a Memoir, author Peter Wortsman, best known for his prose fiction and plays, takes stock of life in late middle age.

First published in 1991 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 Pete Cherches).

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. Straddling the tenuous borderline between the narrative and the poetic, they are all the product of a pressed aesthetic.

Peter Wortsman offers a selection of profiles of Columbia-educated doctors who have made a fundamental difference in the lives of others. The physicians profiled in this book represent the complete spectrum of MDs.

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 that Elgin is in big trouble and blackmails her for sexual favors. Together they go underground to search for the boy. Meanwhile, agents of the IVT (Institute for Vertical Thinking) are also hot on his trail, and the Crabs are feeling the heat.