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 as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history?

A budding poet and his adoring mother are the central characters of this early novel.

Readers are taken through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the ridiculous. They provide merely a narrative framework for Kundera's novel, within which is condensed existential analysis.

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 .

Offers a collection of essays which argues that art is what we have to cleave to in the face of evil, against the expression of the darker side of human nature.

A novel, divided into seven parts and exploring immortality. This is the author's seventh novel. His previous works include The Joke , The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being . He has written one play, Jacques and his Master .

In seven independent, but closely related chapters, the author presents his personal conception of the European novel, which he describes as 'an art born of the laughter of God'.

Klima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, receives a phone call announcing that a young nurse with whom he spent a brief night at a fertility spa is pregnant. She has decided he is the father and so begins a comedy which, during five madcap days, unfolds with ever-increasing speed.

A novel by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being . A moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which crosses and recrosses the divide between fantasy and reality.

This collection contains stories about the sport of love - Don Juanism, ageing, male and female power and seductions undertaken for all kinds of intriguing motives. Milan Kundera is author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting .

A collection of seven essays that sketches out the author's personal view of the history and value of the novel. 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. This work describes how the best novels do just that.

In the course of nine sections, this book examines the major situations of our time in the light of the wisdom of the great novelists: Kafka; Stravinsky; Hemingway; Rabelais; and Janacek. Ultimately, this brings about the question of the betrayed testaments of Europe, art and the novel.

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.

"O cortina magica, tesuta din legende, atarna intre noi si lume. Cervantes l-a trimis pe don Quijote in peregrinare si a sfasiat cortina. Lumea i s-a aratat cavalerului ratacitor in toata goliciunea comica a prozei sale.Aidoma unei femei care se fardeaza inainte de a pleca grabita spre prima ei intalnire, lumea - cand alearga spre noi in clipa cand ne-am nascut - este deja fardata, mascata, preinterpretata. Iar conformistii nu vor fi singurii care vor fi trasi pe sfoara; rebelii, dornici...

Cineva se joaca cu vietile noastre - pare sa spuna Milan Kundera in primul sau roman -, cineva leaga si dezleaga intamplarile in care suntem atrasi cu sau fara voie, impingandu-ne in fundaturi sau oferindu-ne brusc o libertate cu care nu stim ce sa facem. Cineva isi rade de noi, propunandu-ne idealuri care se transforma irevocabil in propriul lor simulacru, fara a inceta totusi sa ne urmareasca si sa ne otraveasca existenta. Cineva se uita la noi necrutator, inregistrand fiecare miscare a...