Michael Henry Heim Books

This is the first novel by the author of "Immortality", which won "The Independent" Award for Foreign Fiction in 1991. Milan Kundera is also the author of "The Book of Laughter and Fogetting".

TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE is a tender and funny story of Hant'a - a man who has lived in a Czech police state - for 35 years, working as compactor of wastepaper and books. In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from jaws of hydraulic press and now his house is filled to the rooftops. Destroyer of the written word, he is also its perpetuator. But when a new automatic press makes his job redundant there's only one thing he can do - go down with his ship. This is an eccentric romp celebrating the indestructability- against censorship, political opression etc - of the written word.

Attempting to go beyond the cliche of Prague as the golden city , this book brings out all its mystery, ambiguity, gloom, lethargy and hidden fascination. More than a literary and cultural history of Prague, this book seeks to be both a celebration and requiem for an oppressed culture.

In this novel - a story of irreconcilable loves and infidelities - Milan Kundera addresses himself to the nature of twentieth-century 'Being' 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. We feel, says the novelist, 'the unbearable lightness of being' - not only as the consequence of our private acts but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.Juxtaposing Prague, Geneva, Thailand and the United States, this masterly novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence. It offers a wide range of brilliant and amusing philosophical speculations and it descants on a variety of styles.

The pieces collected in Lend Me Your Character—the novella "Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life" and a collection of short stories entitled Life Is a Fairy Tale— solidify Dubravka Ugresic's reputation as one of Eastern Europe's most playful and inventive writers. From the story of Steffie Cvek, a harassed and vulnerable typist whose life is shaped entirely by clichés as she searches relentlessly for an elusive romantic love in a narrative punctuated by threadbare advice from women's magazines and constructed like a sewing pattern, to "The Kharms Case," one of Ugresic's funniest stories ever about the strained relationship between a persistent translator and an unresponsive publisher, the pieces in this collection are always smart and endlessly entertaining.

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced. "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…I ought to invoke Günter Grass and Garcia Marquez, because Mr. Kundera belongs in their demonic company." -- John Leonard, The New York Times

Death in Venice tells how Gustave von Aschenbach, a writer utterly absorbed in his work, arrives in Venice as a result of a 'youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes,' and meets there a young boy by whose beauty he becomes obsessed. His pitiful pursuit of the object of his abnormal affection and its inevitable and pathetic climax is told here with the particular skill the author has for this shorter form of fiction. (blurb) Em A Morte em Veneza, Thomas Mann apresenta uma escrita complexa e profunda, onde quase cada parágrafo pode ter várias leituras. Em contraponto, o enredo é praticamente inexistente: um homem de meia-idade viaja até Veneza, apaixona-se platonicamente por um jovem rapaz polaco extremamente atraente e morre sem sequer ter trocado uma palavra com ele.

This ebullient, gallivanting novel encapsulates the world vision of the Czech Republic's best-loved author in one tumbling, breathtaking sentence. Saints and sinners, emperors and embezzlers, barmaids and balalaikas all play their part in the bawdy reminiscences of Hrabal's cobbler as he charms an audience of young beauties.

This is a collection of Neruda's funny, wry, biter-sweet and illuminating stories about life for the inhabitants of the Old Quarter of 19th-century Prague.

Little is known of Karel Havlíček Borovský (1821-56) outside Czechoslovakia, but his fellow Czechs revere him. He is one of their nineteenth-century culture heroes - satirist of great finesse and a shrewd but always humane journalist and politician. The Russian journey proved to be the turning point in Havlíček's life.