Milan Kundera Book order

A provocative and rousing essay collection from one of Europe's greatest living writers

A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman who escaped him 15 years earlier. trapped between her dead husband and a son who rejects everything that is youthful in her, she has allowed herself to age almost beyond recognition. The man's assessment of her appearance is brutal.

Four friends in contemporary Paris who encounter one another at parties and at the Luxembourg Gardens and talk about sex, history, art, politics, and the meaning of life

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.

Milan Kundera’s new collection of essays is a passionate defence of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and whose work helps us better understand the world. An astute and brilliant reader of fiction, Kundera applies these same gifts to the reading of Francis Bacon’s paintings, Leos Janfcek’s music, the films of Federico Fellini, as well as to the novels of Philip Roth, Dostoyevsky and García Mfrquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restoring to their rightful place the works of major writers such as Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte who have fallen into obscurity.Milan Kundera’s signature themes of memory and forgetting, the experience of exile, and his spirited championing of modernist art mark these essays. Art, he argues, is what we have to cleave to in the face of evil, against the expression of the darker side of human nature. Elegant, startlingly original and provocative, Encounter follows Kundera’s essay collections, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed and The Curtain.

"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world," writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his fascinating new book on the art of the novel. "Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose." For Kundera, that 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. In this entertaining and always stimulating essay, Kundera cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, he suggests, a novel is thought about only within the confines of the language and nation of its origin, when in fact the novel's development has always occurred across borders: Laurence Sterne learned from Rabelais, Henry Fielding from Cervantes, Joyce from Flaubert, García Márquez from Kafka. The real work of a novel is not bound up in the specifics of any one language: what makes a novel matter is its ability to reveal some previously unknown aspect of our existence. In The Curtain, Kundera skillfully describes how the best novels do just that.

Perhaps the most ambitious novel from one of Mexico's greatest writers, the narrative covers 20 centuries of European and American culture, and prominently features the construction of El Escorial by Philip II. The title is Latin for "Our earth". Modeled on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Terra Nostra shifts unpredictably between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, seeking the roots of contemporary Latin American society in the struggle between the conquistadors and indigenous Americans. -Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say.- Milan Kundera

Jacques and His Master is a deliciously witty and entertaining play by Milan Kundera, the acclaimed Franco-Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.A highly original variation on Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot's novel Jacques le Fataliste, Jacques and His Master has been successfully staged all over the world. This new translation by Simon Callow has been authorized by Kundera as the definitive edition.

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 of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history?

Sometimes - perhaps only for an instant - we fail to recognise a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us. With his astonishing skill at building on and out from the significant moment, Kundera has placed such a situation and the resulting wave of panic at the core of the novel. In a narrative as intense as it is brief, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which forces the reader to cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality. Profound, sad and disquieting but above all a love story, 'Identity' provides further proof of Kundera's astonishing gifts as a novelist.