Milan Kundera

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

"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...

"Slender but weighty, thoroughly cerebral. . . . It comes as a welcome corrective to so much American-style realist fiction, which in heavy doses can blur into a kind of sameness. . . what is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living between being and nothingness."- Boston Globe From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an unexpected and...

"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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

"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,...