About Peter Trachtenberg
For most of my life I’ve been telling stories. Some of the stories were made up, but most are true,
especially when they deal with subjects of life-or-death significance, for example, the effort to find justice for survivors of the Rwandan genocide, which I wrote about in The Book of Calamities. And the thing about nonfiction is that you can’t make this shit up. Would anyone believe a fictional story about a 60-something artist and college professor (she describes herself as “a demure little person”) buying a wet suit and scuba gear to dive into her basement studio, which was flooded during Superstorm Sandy, to rescue some of her paintings? Trust me, it happened. (The story figures in my forthcoming The Last Artists in New York.