Milan Kundera

In one of the finer modern ironies of the life-imitates-art sort, the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there. This kind of disappearance and reappearance is, partly, what Kundera explores in The …

Encounter is the latest addition to the acclaimed body of literary criticism from beloved author Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). Novelist Russell Banks writes, “Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such …

The Farewell Waltz is a Czech-language novel by Milan Kundera published in 1972. A French edition was published in 1976 and an English version entitled The Farewell Party. This novel mostly deals with love, hate and accidents between eight characters who are drawn together in a small spa town in Czechoslovakia in …

Identity is a novel by Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, published in 1998. It is possibly his most traditional novel in terms of narrative structure. It's also one of his shortest novels. The phrase "masturbating fetus" appears to have been coined in this novel.

A New York Times Notable Book Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier. 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? The truth is that after …