Peter Wortsman has spent his life in the uncharted territory between languages where "geographic borders are infinitely porous, and stories slip [ ] between the cracks." It is the great good luck of his readers that he is a careful cartographer of that space. He tracks what happens when German metamorphoses into English or both into French, and the creatures born of those transformations populate his wondrous tales, which recall those of the Grimms and Kafka but add something special that is Wortsman's own. - Andrew S. Gross, Professor of North American Studies, University of Göttingen