"The elegant English-language debut from Austrian writer Kappacher explores mortality, change, and the creative life via an impressionistic depiction of real-life author and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal ... Kappacher captures the protagonist's fear that his capacity to create, like the world he loved, is lost. It's a moving portrait."
--Publishers Weekly
"Palace of Flies is one of those rare biographical novels that bring a whole world to life in a way that lingers in memory. This is an important book in which Walter Kappacher holds a peculiarly sharp mirror to the past and shows us, as all good historical novels do, an eerily astute glimpse at our present."
--Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me
"Walter Kappacher's novel triumphs in portraying a middle-aged writer who balances the most intimate behavior--insomnia, indigestion--with the grandest of artistic ambitions. He achieves a special pathos by deliberately not underlining what we know--that the fifty-year-old protagonist is a few years from a tragic death and that everything he represents will be burned alive. Kappacher captures a now almost unimaginable sensibility with absolute coherence one hundred years later."
--Anthony Heilbut, author of Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature and Exiled in Paradise
"Neatly wrought ... Palace of Flies is an impressive character-portrait, steeped in the culture and conditions of the time ... The translation certainly does justice to Kappacher's original."
--The Complete Review
"Kappacher's sensitive channeling of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's voice and sensibility illuminates the difficulties of a creative mind to come to terms with a radically changing world. Michael P. Steinberg's brilliantly concise introduction anchors the kaleidoscopic glimmer of the author's memories in the turmoil of the first quarter of the twentieth century."
--Gitta Honegger, author of Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian and translator of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek
"In this melancholy, atmospheric novella, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the former darling of fin de si?cle Vienna, returns to a spa near Salzburg to revive his flagging genius ... Hofmannsthal's love of the humanities and his ambition to promote the arts as a panacea against political violence are bound to speak eloquently to modern readers."
--Historical Novels Review
"In this elaborate, intellectual portrait of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian empire, Hugo von Hofmannsthal emerges as a man whose accomplishments and eloquence have left him utterly unprepared for the desolation of history. A meditation on the artist's struggle to bring to life one's own age, even as that age dissolves, and to make use of time as time makes use of us. A beautiful book."
--Adam Klein, author of The Medicine Burns and Tiny Ladies
"A masterpiece of contemporary story-telling."
-- Der Standard
"Walter Kappacher ... is the most serious author I know. And at the same time there's the paradox that it's a seriousness that's lightly worn."
--Peter Handke, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
