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 …

The Curtain is a seven-part essay by Milan Kundera, along with The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed composing a type of trilogy of book-length essays on the European novel. The Curtain was originally published as "Le Rideau", in French in April 2005 by Gallimard. It is also available in Spanish as "El Telón", …

The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made …

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.

Jacques and his Master is a play written in 1971 by Milan Kundera, which he subtitles "A Homage to Diderot in Three Acts". It was translated by Simon Callow in 1986 and directed by him in 1987.

Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road--only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a …

Vier vrienden belanden op een feest in Parijs, ieder met een heel ander verleden.