Out of print since 1987, "Life Is Elsewhere" is available again in an outstanding new translation. Kundera's epic of adolescence tenderly erodes such sacrosanct values as childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry, in a "remarkable portrait of an artist as a young man" ("Newsweek").
Laughable loves is a collection of stories that first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but then was banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and strategems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs ad impulses that can start a terrifying train of events. Sexual attraction is shown as a game that often turns sour, an experience that brings with it painful insisghts and releases uncertainty, panic, vanity and a constant need for reassurance.
Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy towards his central question: how does a person, any person, live today? In constructing his answer, he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation - and of their antidotes: laughter and forgetting.
Set in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, the story revolves around a young doctor who has a way with women and an aversion to politics. He suddenly finds himself caught up in his country's political turmoil and in a crisis of commitment with the women in his life.
Set in the not-too-distant past, this comic and exuberantly lustful tale by the author of The Miracle Game is also a savage parody of life under foreign occupation. The conscripts of a Czech battalion prepare themselves for inevitable war with the US - using unconventional tactics.