Milan Kundera
Author
Language
English
Description
"An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level-political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." -Newsweek
"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." -New York Times
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative...
4) Immortality
Author
Publisher
Grove Weidenfeld
Pub. Date
c1991
Language
English
Description
Milan Kundera's novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnès becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore...
5) Ignorance
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
2002
Language
English
Description
"Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace." - Washington Post Book World
"Nothing short of masterful." - Newsweek
A brilliant novel set in contemporary Prague, by one of the most distinguished writers of our time.
A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread...
6) Identity
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins
Pub. Date
1998
Language
English
Description
"Kundera, master of the twosome, finds erotic and existential threads everywhere in daily behavior. Like his previous books, Identity is a cluster of jeweled observations. . . . But Identity has a special charm: suspense. . . . [It] gets us turning the pages in excitement and alarm, and Kundera's wit keeps us turning them to the very end." - San Francisco Chronicle
In a narrative as intense as it is brief, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex...
7) Slowness
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins
Pub. Date
c1996
Language
English
Description
"Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it." - Mirabella
Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French.
Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than...
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
2006
Language
English
Description
In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that "the curtain" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has-a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the...
Author
Publisher
HarperFlamingo
Pub. Date
c1998
Language
English
Description
In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend, an oddball gynecologist, a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan), a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife, an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward.
Perhaps the most brilliantly plotted...
Author
Publisher
Grove Press
Pub. Date
c1988
Language
English
Description
Kundera brilliantly examines the evolution, construction, and essence of the novel as an art form through the lens of his own work and through the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Musil, Kafka, and perhaps the least known of all the great novelists of our time, Hermann Broch.
Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the...
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
1995
Language
English
Description
A brilliant and thought-provoking essay from one of the twentieth century's masters of fiction, Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both-often by their most passionate...
12) Laughable loves
Author
Publisher
Penguin Books
Pub. Date
c1987
Language
English
Description
"An intellectual heavyweight and a pure literary virtuoso, Milan Kundera takes some of Freud's most cherished complexes and irreverently whirls them about in acts of legerdemain that capture our darkest, deepest human passions. . . . The tales in Laughable Loves surprise and illuminate. . . . Kundera's world is complex, full of mockeries and paradoxes. Life is often brutal and humiliating; it is often blasphemous, funny, irritating." - Cleveland Plain...
Author
Pub. Date
1974
Language
English
Description
"I will say no more about this lacerating book except to urge it upon all who care about literature in our difficult era." - Boston Globe
"A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism. . . Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust."- Time
Milan Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to him, is youth, and this novel,...
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"A short collection of brilliant early essays that offers a fascinating context for the Milan Kundera's subsequent career and holds a mirror to much recent European history. It is also remarkably prescient with regard to Russia's current aggression in Ukraine and its threat to the rest of Europe."--Amazon.