From sexual fantasies to holidays this marvellous book charts our escape attempts. In a series of dazzling commentaries the authors reveal the ordinary and extraordinary ways in which we seek to defy the despair of the breakfast table and the office But the book is much more than a first-rate cartography of everyday life. It crackles with important theoretical insights about how `normality' is managed. This fully revised edition contains a superb new introduction, `Life After Postmodernism', which exposes the conceits of the postmodernist adventure and which should be required reading for anyone interested in making sense of everyday life.

`The new introduction is a fine piece of work ... the book is even more timely today than it was fifteen years ago when the first edition was published' - Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism

`Escape Attempts pays homage to the diverse, often ingenious ways in which people everywhere set about constructing fragile architecture round themselves capable of withstanding the dreary pressures not just of `paramount reality' but of sociological theory itself' - Dick Hebdidge, author of Hiding In The Light