Intimate Ties

“[These stories] mimic the circular thought patterns of private obsession with such authenticity that they could easily frighten readers . . . each novella scrutinizes the inchoate nature of the human psyche with great audacity and compassion, and each functions as a resolute exploration of the limitations of self-expression through language.”
—The Hudson Review

Praise for Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, translated by Peter Wortsman:

“Musil’s linguistic facility—the merging of aim, manner and result—is virtuosic. He’s such a consummate stylist that after him Kafka may seem immature, Mann chatty, Brecht arch, Rilke precious and Walter Benjamin hermetic. And Peter Wortsman’s translation is splendid, succeeding in capturing this author’s unique combination of quizzical authority and austere hedonism.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Funny, sad and true—or rather funny because they are both sad and true—such observations are, to use a typical Musil phrase, a form of ‘daylight mysticism,’ shafts of light in a darkening world.”
—Chicago Tribune

Praise for Peter Wortsman’s translation of Konundrum by Franz Kafka:

“The translator Peter Wortsman’s excellent and bracing new selection of Kafka’s stories, Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka . . . brings the author’s peculiar rhetoric to glorious life.”
—Morten Høi Jensen, Los Angeles Review of Books