Dubbed a "20th-century Brother Grimm" (Bloomsbury Review) and "a delinquent Hans Christian Andersen" (by playwright Mark O'Donnell), Peter Wortsman was saluted by the late Hubert Selby, Jr. (author of Last Exit to Brooklyn) as "an excellent artist...Wortsman [succeeds] so well in his craft and art that it reads 'artless' and 'spontaneous,' which to me is the highest of compliments."The Boston Phoenix wrote: "Wortsman hangs with the masters."He is the author of a book of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die (Fromm Int'l, 1991); a novel, Cold Earth Wanderers (Pelekenesis, 2014); a limited edition artists' book, it-t=i, produced in collaboration with his brother, artist Harold Wortsman, comprising his prose poetry and his brother's etchings (here and now press, 2004), in several major collections, including The Library of Congress, and a travel memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin, A Rhapsody in Gray (Travelers' Tales, 2013). His anthology, Tales of the German Imagination, From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, was published by Penguin classics in 2013. He has also written two stage plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All, 2000, and Burning Words, 2004. The latter play was premiered by the Hampshire Shakespeare Company at the Northampton Center for the Arts, in Northampton, Mass., in 2006, and premiered,in German translation, at the Kulturhaus Osterfeld, in Pforzheim, Germany, in 2014. His many English translations from the German include: Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, by Robert Musil, now in its third edition (Eridanos, 1987, Penguin 20th-Century Classics, 1995; Archipelago Books, 2006); Peter Schlemiel, by Adelbert von Chamisso (Fromm Int'l, 1993); Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg (Archipelago, 2007); Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine (Archipelago, 2008); Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist (Archipelago, 2010); and Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Archipelago, 2013). Also a travel writer, his work has appeared in major newspapers, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, as well as magazines and websites, and was selected five years in a row for The Best Travel Writing, 2008-2012. New Word City issued two short eBooks of his travel writing, The Urban Nomad - Paris, and The Urban Nomad - Vienna. His essays have appeared, in German translation, in Die Welt, Die Zeit, The Atlantic Times, and Cicero, Magazin für politische Kultur. His prose poetry has appeared in various anthologies, including The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal, Providence, RI, and White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY, 2000; 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, New York University Press, NY, 2002; The House of Your Dream: An International Collection of Prose Poetry, White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY 2008; and Short, An International Anthology, Persea Books, NY 2014.He was the recipient of the 1985 Beard's Fund Short Story Award and the 2008 Gertje Potash-Suhr Prose Prize of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German. A former Fellow of the Fulbright (1973) and Thomas J. Watson (1974) Foundations, he was the Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in Spring 2010. His travel memoir "Ghost Dance in Berlin, A Rhapsody in Gray" was short-listed for a 2013 Eric Hoffer Book Award and won a 2014 Silver Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY)in the "travel essay" category.