“Prague Palimpsest is one of the most intriguing and exciting books written about this ancient cosmopolitan city. Based on prodigious research, Thomas offers a complex close reading of the main figures and topics of Prague’s cultural and literary history. He begins with the foundational legends of the fascinating Libuše corpus before moving on to Kafka and his contemporaneous foreign visitors to Prague, like Apollinaire; he then considers the dramatic rupture of the Holocaust and the post-Shoah palimpsestic reelaborations in the works of Bachmann, Celan, and Sebald before concluding with an outlook on postmodern Czech authors. In doing so the book sets new and attractive standards of intertextual research and dialogical comparative cultural expeditions, inviting us to revisit Prague and at the same time to rediscover lost splinters of our own past or identity.”—Primus-Heinz Kucher, University of Klagenfurt, Austria

[shorter version]
“Prague Palimpsest is one of the most intriguing and exciting books written about this ancient cosmopolitan city. Alfred Thomas invites us to revisit Prague and at the same time to rediscover lost splinters of our own past or identity.”—Primus-Heinz Kucher, University of Klagenfurt, Austria