Peter Wortsman, whose translations of selections of Franz Kafka were just highly praised by the BBC, will be joined by poet Geoffrey O’Brien to discuss the new release and muse on all things literary, artistic, and Kafkaesque at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn October 20th, 2016 at 7 pm. 

Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka gathers new translations of stories, journals, and letters by the famous author. Jane Ciabattari of the BBC wrote that Kafka’s writings are still “powerfully resonant today,” and she went on to say that Wortsman’s selection of pieces gives us both “a fresh look at classics like The Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, and Josephine, Our Meistersinger,” and new and fresh “surprises like Poseidon.”

Don’t miss out on what is sure to be a great event.

photo credit: Ricky Owens

Peter Wortsman was a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellow in 1974, and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. His writing has been honored with the 1985 Beard’s Fund Short Story Award, the 2008 Gertje Potash-Suhr Prosapreis of 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). His travel reflections were selected five years in a row, 2008-2012, and again in 2016, for inclusion in The Best Travel Writing. He is the author of two books of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die (1991) and Footprints in Wet Cement (forthcoming 2017), the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All (2000) and Burning Words (2006), and the travel memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray (2013), and a novel Cold Earth Wanderers (2014). Wortsman’s numerous translations from the German include Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg, Travel Pictures by Heinrich Heine, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil, Peter Schelmiel, The Man Who Sold His Shadow by Adelbert von Chamisso, and Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, many of which are published by Archipelago Books. He edited and translated an anthology, Tales of the German Imagination: From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, from Penguin Classics. He works as a medical and travel journalist.

Geoffrey O’Brien is a poet, editor, and cultural historian. He is editor in chief for the Library of America. His books include Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears, Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle, and The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading, among many more. He lives in New York City.