François Kérel Knihy

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

A young Czech whose mother has molded him into a poet becomes the people's literary hero during a Communist rally in 1948

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.

Laughable loves is a collection of stories that first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but then was banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and strategems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs ad impulses that can start a terrifying train of events. Sexual attraction is shown as a game that often turns sour, an experience that brings with it painful insisghts and releases uncertainty, panic, vanity and a constant need for reassurance.

Set in the not-too-distant past, this comic and exuberantly lustful tale by the author of The Miracle Game is also a savage parody of life under foreign occupation. The conscripts of a Czech battalion prepare themselves for inevitable war with the US - using unconventional tactics.