While there are many courses and tutorials online, learning from a book is still one of the best ways to greatly improve your skills. Below I have selected top Milan Kundera books.
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (2009)
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1999)
- Immortality (Perennial Classics) (1999)
- Ignorance (2003)
- The Festival of Insignificance: A Novel (2016)
- The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classics) (2003)
- Identity: A Novel (1999)
- The Joke (Definitive Version) (1900)
- Slowness: A Novel (1997)
- Life Is Elsewhere (2000)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (2009)
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places; brilliant and playful reflections; and a variety of styles to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1999)
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications.
Immortality (Perennial Classics) (1999)
Milan Kundera’s sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert’s Emma or Tolstoy’s Anna, Kundera’s AgnÈs becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing.
Ignorance (2003)
A New York Times Notable BookIrena 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 Festival of Insignificance: A Novel (2016)
From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an unexpected and enchanting novel—the culmination of his life's work.Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism—that’s The Festival of Insignificance.
The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classics) (2003)
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka’s novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka’s bureaucratized universe.Kundera’s discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.
Identity: A Novel (1999)
There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples-indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else “losing sight” of the loved one.
The Joke (Definitive Version) (1900)
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications.
Slowness: A Novel (1997)
Milan Kundera’s lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author’s fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer’s night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic.
Life Is Elsewhere (2000)
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 him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed.
Best Milan Kundera Books that Should be on Your Bookshelf
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Library Genesis and download some milan kundera books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe
Author(s): Milan Kundera
ID: 3701022, Publisher: Faber and Faber, Year: 2023, Size: 193 Kb, Format: epub
The Art of the Novel
Author(s): Milan Kundera
ID: 3739681, Publisher: Faber & Faber, Year: 2020, Size: 231 Kb, Format: epub
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide
Author(s): Bright Summaries
ID: 3404231, Publisher: BrightSummaries.com, Year: 2018, Size: 1 Mb, Format: epub
Please note that this booklist is not errorless. Some books are absolutely best-sellers according to Washington Post, others are written by unknown writers. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant books you could recommend? Drop a comment if you have any feedback on the list.