First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy-with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia's artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country's socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. Derek Sayer shows that Prague's twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some "end of history," whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times. In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers-poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians-caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee-not to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way and Vaclav Havel's greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Over and over, Prague exposes modernity's dreamworlds of progress as confections of kitsch. In a time when democracy is once again under global assault, Postcards from Absurdistan is an unforgettable portrait of a city that illuminates the predicaments of the modern world.

What is hidden in the taste of a madeleine - or in snatches of Bob Dylan songs, operatic arias, and the remembered sting of a rattan cane? An exploration of memory, Going Down for Air artfully combines two very different yet connected texts. A Memoir is richly evocative not only of times past, but also of a very English, imperial, queerly masculine subjectivity, caught on the cusp of the extinction of the world in and of which it made sense. Derek Sayer's allusive writing succeeds as few have done before in capturing the leaps and bounds of memory itself. Rich in its detail, unstinting in its honesty, this beautifully written memoir is a considerable literary achievement. The memoir is complemented by Sayer's provocative theoretical essay on memory and social identity. Drawing on linguistic and psychoanalytic theory, photographic images, and literary texts, In Search of a Subject argues that it is memory above all that maintains the imagined identities upon which society rests. Going Down for Air is a bold and strikingly successful literary and sociological experiment, which makes a major contribution to understanding how our memories work - and gives them social meaning far beyond

What is hidden in the taste of a madeleine - or in snatches of Bob Dylan songs, operatic arias, and the remembered sting of a rattan cane? An exploration of memory, Going Down for Air artfully combines two very different yet connected texts. A Memoir is richly evocative not only of times past, but also of a very English, imperial, queerly masculine subjectivity, caught on the cusp of the extinction of the world in and of which it made sense. Derek Sayer's allusive writing succeeds as few have done before in capturing the leaps and bounds of memory itself. Rich in its detail, unstinting in its honesty, this beautifully written memoir is a considerable literary achievement. The memoir is complemented by Sayer's provocative theoretical essay on memory and social identity. Drawing on linguistic and psychoanalytic theory, photographic images, and literary texts, In Search of a Subject argues that it is memory above all that maintains the imagined identities upon which society rests. Going Down for Air is a bold and strikingly successful literary and sociological experiment, which makes a major contribution to understanding how our memories work - and gives them social meaning far beyond

The nature of modernity, and its connection with capitalism, are questions at the heart of contemporary sociological debate. In "Capitalism and Modernity," Derek Sayer critically re-examines the answers given by two of the greatest social theorists of capitalism, Karl Marx and Max Weber. He provides a fresh reading of both men's work, and breaks new ground in showing the remarkable relevance of their thought to the modern condition. From behind the well-worn stereotypes of "the Marx-Weber debate" emerges a disturbing critique of modern sociality, subjectivity, and power which has lost none of its intellectual force or moral relevance.
Clearly and compellingly written, "Capitalism and Modernity" is a major work of original scholarship. As an authoritative yet accessible commentary on a debate central to modern sociology and politics, this work is likely to become a seminal text in social theory.

In "The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline--a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered only in the margins of other people's stories. In "The Coasts of Bohemia," Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a comprehensive and long-needed history of the Czech people that is also a remarkably original history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy center.

Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theater of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe; and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored.

"The Coasts of Bohemia" draws on an enormous array of literary, musical, visual, and documentary sources ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into intimate contact with the ever changing details of daily life--the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps--that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech. Sayer's sustained concern with questions of identity, memory, and power place the book at the heart of contemporary intellectual debate. It is an extraordinary story, beautifully told.