Peter Wortsman

Jan 15, 2025 | lrb.co.uk | E.T.A. Hoffmann |Jack Zipes |Polly Dickson |Peter Wortsman

Having reached​ a point in his career when he could swat away the advances made by editors of literary magazines, E.T.A. Hoffmann asked a particularly demanding publisher to disabuse himself of the ‘unfortunate notion that I am suffering from a writer’s diarrhoea whereby, with every evacuation, some little story or novel makes its exit!’ In the same letter, written in January 1822, a few months before his death, Hoffmann called this ‘mechanical’ writing.

Apr 20, 2023 | jewishbookcouncil.org | Matthue Roth |Franz Kafka |Peter Wortsman |Roberto Calasso

One of the most telling (yet pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal) anec­dotes about the Czech Jew­ish writer Franz Kaf­ka: He sits in a room full of friends and reads one of his ear­ly works aloud. At points he has to stop. He can’t car­ry on. He is laugh­ing too hard. Suf­fice to say, no one else is laughing. Replace those friends in the room with — oh, I don’t know, every­one in all his­to­ry — and that’s how, a lot of the time, one feels about Kafka’s sto­ries. They’re weird and freaky and fun­ny.