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...

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 ...

“I can’t imagine reading this book without being challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately delighted.” —John Simon, New York Times Book ReviewMilan Kundera’s brilliant collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterizes his bestselling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better und...

"A thoughtful, intricate, ambivalent novel with the reach of greatness in it." —John Updike"It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy, and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. Milan Kundera is an artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere, who says that the good (and evil) that issues from men's souls matters much more than the deeds of a State. And he says it with passion, with good humor, and with love." —Salman Rushdie

"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 ...

"After Farewell Waltz there cannot be any doubt. Kundera is a master of contemporary literature. This novel is both an an example of virtuosity and a descent into the human soul." —L'UniteSet in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.

“Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace.” — Washington Post Book World“Nothing short of masterful.” — NewsweekA 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 e...

“Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.” — The New Republic"Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels." — Milan KunderaKundera brilliantly examines the evolution, construction, and essence o...

"Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it." — MirabellaMilan 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 nig...

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...

"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."— TimeMilan Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, accordin...

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...