New York Times Bestseller"Inspired. . . . Kundera's most brilliantly imagined novel. . . . A book that entrances, beguiles and charms us from first page to last." — Cleveland Plain DealerMilan Kundera's sixth 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 o...

The bestselling modern classic for fans of Dostoyevsky's White Nights and Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a Fur Coat: the iconic novel of love, angst and politics in communist Czechoslovakia.A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon: a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals, while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualitie...

The last novel by the international superstar and author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'Kundera is the saddest, funniest, and most lovable of authors.' TimesAn artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie'Kundera designs fictions of the highest order.' Ian McEwanCasting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one ...

"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 TimesRich in its stories, characters, and imaginative ...

An invigorating duo of essays exploring exile, language and national identity from one of Europe's most celebrated literary stars and author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.89 Words, published in 1985, is an expanded version of the dictionary of sorts that readers encountered in The Art of the Novel, and comprises a fascinating and rigorous interrogation of what exile, life in another language, and the betrayals of ...

Two newly translated works from one of the greatest literary writers and thinkers of the modern age, available together in English for the first time.Translating a work from its original language can be complicated; it’s a complex art that can easily mar and twist the intent and meaning of a writer’s words. Precise translations were of particular importance to Milan Kundera, who did not live to see all his books published in his native Czech language. Words, for Kundera, were the o...

International Bestseller • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction“Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — PeopleIn The Unbearable Lightness of Being, acclaimed author Milan Kundera tells the story of ...

The bestselling masterpiece tale of love and exile in Prague by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie'A subtle, penetrating and deeply felt exploration of the sadness, loneliness and irreparable loss of exile: one of [Kundera's] best novels.' Sunday TimesIrena has been exiled to Paris since leaving C...

The New York Times bestseller by the author of legendary cult classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'Like all great writers, Kundera leaves indelible marks on his readers' imaginations.' Salman RushdieFrom a playful gesture between an old woman in a swimming pool and a youthful lifeguard springs the heroine of a novel: Agnès. In the course of her daily life - Saturday chores, saunas, lunch in the hectic Paris ...

"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 Dealer

A provocative and rousing insight into European politics from one of the world's greatest writers.'One of his most powerful works.' Financial Times'A pan-European intellectual force.' TimesIn a moment of historic peril and uncertainty in mainland Europe, Milan Kundera makes the case for Central Europe as the nucleus of European values and as a lightning rod for its potential dangers.For the countries that ma...

'A masterpiece' (Salman Rushdie) by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'It took the temperature of the age as no other book did. It was the great novel of the end of European Communism: a novel of ideas and eroticism, the surreal and the naturalistic.' Howard Jacobson'One is torn between profound pleasure in the novel's execution and wonder at the pain that inspired it.' Ian McEwan