Interweaves story and dream, past and present, and philosophy and poetry in the sardonic and erotic tale of two couples--Tomas and Teresa, and Sabina and her Swiss lover, Gerhart

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Literature & Fiction

Milan,Kundera

Contemporary

Harper&Row

Slowness

Two simultaneous stories, both taking place in a French chateau two centuries apart, details the sexual encounters of an eighteenth-century couple and the absence of sex for a twentieth-century married couple and compares the "morning after" of the two men. $100,000 ad/promo.

Harpercollins

"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world," writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his fascinating new book on the art of the novel. "Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose." For Kundera, that 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.
In this entertaining and always stimulating essay, Kundera cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, he suggests, a novel is thought about only within the confines of the language and nation of its origin, when in fact the novel's development has always occurred across borders: Laurence Sterne learned from Rabelais, Henry Fielding from Cervantes, Joyce from Flaubert, García Márquez from Kafka. The real work of a novel is not bound up in the specifics of any one language: what makes a novel matter is its ability to reveal some previously unknown aspect of our existence. In The Curtain, Kundera skillfully describes how the best novels do just that.

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

Reference

Harper

More than 700,000 copies sold. Basis for the world-acclaimed film. "A meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small." People

KUNDERA, MILAN

Commissioned and closely monitored by Milan Kundera himself, this new translation brings a clarity and unmatched fidelity to the author's original text. Widely held as a work of genius, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that first brought him to the forefront of the international literary scene. Rich in stories, characters and imaginative range, it was written while Kundera was still forbidden to publish in his home country of Czechoslovakia, which was then behind the Iron Curtain. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of modern existence from the posthumous erasure of "enemies" of communism from the historical record, to the subtle agony of the fading memory of a lost love, to the bizarre sexlessnes of modern promiscuity are explored with boldness, subversive humor and the magical power of fiction.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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 proponents—is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book.

Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Perennial

A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover—these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

Harper Perennial Modern Classics

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Writers from the Other Europe)

Penguin??Books

Book of Laughter and Forgetting (King Penguin)

Penguin Books, Ltd.

This collection contains stories about the sport of love - Don Juanism, ageing, male and female power and seductions undertaken for all kinds of intriguing motives. Milan Kundera is author of Unbearable Lightness of Being and the Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Laughable Loves (King Penguin)

Short Stories & Anthologies

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Milan,Kundera. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Milan,Kundera

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Milan,Kundera. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Slowness

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Writers from the Other Europe)

Book of Laughter and Forgetting (King Penguin)

Laughable Loves (King Penguin)