A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover--these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. 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. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after "The Joke" was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.

The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of "The...

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'.

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 previous

With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels, Milan Kundera illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and whose work helps us better understand the world.

In this story of irreconcilable loves and infidelities, Milan Kundera addresses himself to the nature of 20th century Being. The novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence.

A novel, divided into seven parts and exploring immortality. His previous works include 'The Joke', 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' and 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'.

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.

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.

In this novel, Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy, towards his central question: 'how does a person, any person, live today?'. Towards his answer he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation and of their antidotes.