There are three idealists: God, mothers, and poets! They don't seek the ideal in completed things - they find it in the incomplete. —Peter Altenberg

"If it be permitted to speak of 'love at first sound,' then that's what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose." So wrote Thomas Mann of the work of Peter Altenberg. A virtuoso Fin-de-Siècle Viennese innovator of what he called the "telegram style" of writing, Altenberg's signature short prose straddles the line between the lyrical and the narrative, the poetic and the prosaic, fiction and observation, harsh verity and whimsical vignette. Inspired by the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Viennese Feuilleton, a light journalistic reflection current in his day, Altenberg carved out a spare, strikingly modern aesthetic that speaks with an eerie prescience to our own impatient time. Peter Wortsman's new selection and translation reads like a sly lyrical wink from the turn-of-the-century of the telegram to the turn-of-the-millenium of email.

See Peter Wortsman read from the book here.