The Palimpsest

In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger’s kiss.… Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse—a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers: Oleg, a New York locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They’ve each lost something important—a wife, a lover, a sister, a direction in life—and what they will find in Palimpsest is more than they could ever imagine.

Drawing together diverse literary, critical and theoretical texts in which the palimpsest has appeared since its inauguration by Thomas De Quincey in 1845, Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory provides the first ever genealogy of this metaphor. Sarah Dillon's original theorisation argues that the palimpsest has an involuted structure which illuminates and advances modern thought. While demonstrating how this structure refigures concepts such as history, subjectivity, temporality, metaphor, textuality and sexuality, Dillon returns repeatedly to the question of reading. This theorisation is interwoven with close readings of texts by D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan and H.D. Clearly written, and negotiating a range of critical theories and modern literary texts, it provides a reference point and critical tool for future employment of the concept of 'palimpsestuousness', and makes a significant contribution to the debate surrounding the relationship between theoretical and critical writing on literature.

An interdisciplinary reassessment of a vital and understudied field. Material remains of houses and textual evidence for private living are crucial to our understanding of the architectural and decorative characteristics of the ancient house and the way private space was used. As buildings in which both private and public activities could take place, ancient dwellings provide a window onto the social, economic, political, and religious aspects of societies. However, despite its invaluable significance for our knowledge of ancient times, housing still largely remains an underestimated field of research. This edited volume includes papers presented at the 8th International ANAMED Annual Symposium, held at Istanbul's Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in 2013. The contributions focus on the developments, continuities, and changes in private housing across the Mediterranean during Roman, Late Antique, and Early Islamic times. The volume sheds light on the interaction between houses of various regions and time periods, exploring the architectural features, layout and interior, and builders and users of private houses.

Przesnicki, an Eastern-European immigrant writer, has survived long Soviet toilet paper lines, the loss of his lover Ernest Hemingway following a passionate affair, and the beatings of the Antarctic literary community for his forays into novel-writing in their native tongue. In The Palimpsests, Aleksandra Lun's stunning debut novel, we find him languishing in a Belgium asylum (a country, we are persistently reminded, that has had no government for the past year!), undergoing Bartlebian therapy to strip away his knowledge of any language that is not Polish, his native tongue. Despite or perhaps because of its absurdity (by turns comic and tragic), The Palimpsests is characterized by an unquestionable timeliness, relevant to today's discussions about immigration, senses of cultural belonging and ownership, and personal relationships to language, complicated and simple, adopted and native. Peppered with darkly comic cameos from famous writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and of course, Przesnicki's former lover Ernest Hemingway, it is the perfect book for lovers of language and the act of writing. Originally written in Spanish by Polish writer Aleksandra Lun, The Palimpsests has been expertly translated into English by Elizabeth Bryer.

Distinguished scholars discuss editorial theory and how it is applied across the humanities

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.