I stumbled across several recent reviews of my book Postcards from Absurdistan. Here are some extracts.

“Postcards from Absurdistan is the third in a loose trilogy of books Derek Sayer has written about modern Czech cultural history … Put next to one another, the trilogy’s some 1,700 pages provide a tour de force of Czech cultural history … Sayer’s mise-en-scène and his analysis are always erudite, sometimes revisionist and frequently compelling … the book and the trilogy are tremendous achievements … this eminently readable book … is a well-balanced introduction to the Czech twentieth century for students and the wider public, and also offers many insights for expert scholars. Derek Sayer has written a deserving conclusion to his Czech trilogy.”—”The Last Postcard from Prague,” Felic Jeschke, CEU Review of Books

“Beginning with the intimate relationship between Franz Kafka and the Czech feminist, journalist, and writer Milena Jesenská, the book embarks on a colorful journey through the fates of hundreds of figures of Bohemian cultural life between 1918 and 1989. For Sayer, Prague is a loose starting point for the interweaving of the lives of the actors in his book, wherever these took place. He thus traces both the artistic activities and the private—and in many cases intimate—lives of countless Czech writers, architects, artists, and filmmakers, and of their partners, children, and extended families. He vividly shows the interconnectedness of their fates (and often their bedrooms), whether their lives’ vicissitudes took place in Prague, Paris, New York, or Tokyo, in their apartments, villas, or offices, in the torture chambers of the Nazi occupiers, in refugee camps, or in the interrogation rooms of the Communist secret police … Sayer displays a deeply impressive knowledge of modern Czech cultural history, which he manages to construct into an extremely appealing narrative … a literarily brilliant and empirically rich collage of stories from the history of Czech culture in the twentieth century.”—Rudolf Kučera, Journal of Modern History

“Sayer chronicles a world of the absurd but also contributes to it. Essentially he provides an episodic celebration of the Czech contribution to (post)modern civilization, with some brilliant aperçus … we learn much about the strategies of intellectuals and artists to frustrate successive orthodoxies of oppressive political regimes and especially about the genesis of the celebrated crop of Czech novelists and dramatists of the absurd headed by Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, and Václav Havel … In the absence of any comparative dimension to this book, it might well seem that Sayer exaggerates his case for Czech primacy in absurdism, in the spirit of Jára Cimrman, the larger-than-life inventor and discoverer whose exploits included leaving three missed-call messages on Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone. Yet perhaps, on second thought, the cult of Cimrman, “the greatest Czech who never lived” (he was himself invented in 1960s Prague, initially as a radio character) is actually strong evidence that the claim, precisely in its flippancy, carries some weight.”—R.J.W. Evans, Common Knowledge

“Derek Sayer’s latest dive into Czech cultural history traces the winding paths of its protagonists through artistic movements, war, exile, and oppression … The absurdity implied in the title is shown repeatedly to be the result of the heavy hand of politics interfering with the life and work of the country’s cultural greats. Virtually no one escapes unscathed. Death, prison, and exile are as common among these Czech writers and artists as gallery openings and publication … The book’s main title is Postcards from Absurdistan, and the sense of absurdity is largely delivered. Yet the story branches out so internationally – from Prague to Paris to Moscow to Tokyo, India, and the Utah desert, among other places – and the absurdity presented seems so evenly shared, that it can make the world in general appear an Absurdistan. It very likely is, yet there is a particular style of absurdity found in 20th century Central and Eastern Europe, whether nationalist, communist, or a combination of the two, which the book effectively presents and defines.”—Michael Stein, “The Unsummoned Convention of Genius,” Transitions.