Peter Trachtenberg, memoirist, essayist & story writer “Trachtenberg…rais[es] complex questions about justice, malice, compassion, blame, self-pity, personal responsibility, faith, and doubt….” “The artistry and humor of his writing, the pain of his mercilessly self-punishing insights, the relentlessness of his guilty misanthropy…all give Trachtenberg a solid claim to being a genuine American Dostoevsky.” “Trachtenberg is a splendid writer: brutally direct, whimsically funny, always enlightening. Read him.”
Trachtenberg’s fiction, essays, and reportage have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Bomb, A Public Space, Bidoun, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New York Times Travel Magazine. He has performed his monologues at Dixon Place, PS 122, and The Kitchen and broadcast commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, the Nelson Algren Prize for Short Fiction, an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a 2010-2011 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2008-2009 he was a visiting professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. |
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Peter Trachtenberg is the author of The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little, Brown 2008), a book that combines reportage, memoir, and moral philosophy to explore suffering and its narratives, which won the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for works that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity. In 1997, his debut book, Seven Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh (Crown) was published. Of this book, the Montreal Gazette wrote, “Seven Tattoos is like a Lou Reed record: off-key and on the mark at the same time….A reminder that the memoir, when it’s revealing and reflective, can go where the best literature has always sought to go - straight to the human heart.” |