Fiction. These FOOTPRINTS IN WET CEMENT are just that: stories–some experienced, some homespun, some dredged from the fertile detritus of dreams; impressions gathered and ruminations fermented over the past decade or so–the fleeting imprint of a life left to harden in the ephemeral mold of language. Straddling the tenuous borderline between the narrative and the poetic, they are all the product of a pressed aesthetic.

In these delicious short (often very short) stories, Peter Wortsman crosses Kafkaesque absurdity with Chekhovian realism, fairy-tale and fable with everyday journal entry. A master of the telling detail, Wortsman is one of those rare writers upon whom nothing, as Henry James put it, is ever lost. The slightest incident can be seen to contain magic, an absurd TV commercial can prompt the most erotic of fantasies: it’s all in a day’s (or rather a night’s) work and usually momentary. FOOTPRINTS IN WET CEMENT is a book to be kept on the bedside table: open anywhere at any time and you will be completely captivated.–Marjorie Perloff