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| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera, 2023-03-28 An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous. —Newsweek The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius. —New York Times 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. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The JOKE Milan Kundera, 1993-02-26 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 Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Immortality Milan Kundera, 1999-10-20 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 Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Such Small Hands Andrés Barba, 2017 Shirley Jackson meets The Virgin Suicides, set at an all-girls orphanage. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Farewell Waltz Milan Kundera, 2023-05-23 After Farewell Waltz there cannot be any doubt. Kundera is a master of contemporary literature. This novel is both an an example of virtuosity and a descent into the human soul. —L'Unite Set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. In this dark farce of a novel, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; and an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. It is perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and sheer entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels. Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, the book was first published (in 1976) in France under the title La valse aux adieux (Farewell Waltz), and later in thirty-four other countries. This beautiful translation, made from the French text prepared by the novelist himself, fully reflects Kundera's own tone and intentions, and offers an opportunity for both the discovery and the rediscovery of one of the very best of a great writer's works. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera, 2023-03-28 “Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, 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. 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. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Slowness Milan Kundera, 2023-04-25 Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it. — Mirabella 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. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about dancers possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Encounter Milan Kundera, 2010-08-17 Milan Kundera's collection of essays is a defense of the arts in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. --From publisher description. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Identity Milan Kundera, 2023-04-25 Kundera, master of the twosome, finds erotic and existential threads everywhere in daily behavior. Like his previous books, Identity is a cluster of jeweled observations. . . . But Identity has a special charm: suspense. . . . [It] gets us turning the pages in excitement and alarm, and Kundera's wit keeps us turning them to the very end. — San Francisco Chronicle In a narrative as intense as it is brief, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which forces the reader to cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality. Sometimes—perhaps only for an instant—we fail to recognize a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple, where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us. With his astonishing skill at building on and out from the significant moment, Milan Kundera has placed such a situation and the resulting wave of panic at the core of this novel. Hailed as a a fervent and compelling romance, a moving fable about the anxieties of love and separateness (Baltimore Sun), it is not to be missed. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Ignorance Milan Kundera, 2023-05-23 “Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace.” — Washington Post Book World “Nothing short of masterful.” — Newsweek A brilliant novel set in contemporary Prague, by one of the most distinguished writers of our time. 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 almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence “their memories no longer match.” We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Only those who return after 20 years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand. Kundera is the only author today who can take dizzying concepts such as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Night Burns Bright Ross Barkan, 2022-02 In this coming-of-age thriller, a twelve-year-old boy's spark of courage to question the harmonious wooded commune he calls home may burn down more than just his own illusions. Lucien has everything he needs: a loving mama, a library full of books, and House of Earth, a private school nestled safely in the woods of upstate New York. It's where Lucien is taught the importance of living in harmony with nature and building a peaceful and sustainable future. But when his youthful curiosity draws him into town and to Gabrielle, a public-school student living a life wholly different from his own, Lucien's inquisitiveness about life beyond the commune and questions regarding the events of 9/11 threaten to unbalance everything he thought he knew. Slowly, things begin to change at House of Earth. The outside world is off limits. Security measures tighten. New rules are put in place, and anyone who violates them is asked to leave and never spoken of again. As forbidden questions pile up, Lucien's willingness to obey weakens. Continuing to meet Gabrielle in secret only reinforces his gnawing fear that something about his world is terribly wrong. Unable to remain silent any longer, Lucien will soon discover that looking for answers at House of Earth may be the most dangerous rule he can break. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Jacques and His Master Milan Kundera, 2023-07-18 A deliciously witty and entertaining variation on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fatalist, written for Milan Kundera's private pleasure in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the heavy Russian irrationality fell on Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera explains, he felt drawn to the spirit of the eighteenth century—And it seemed to me that nowhere was it to be found more densely concentrated than in that banquet of intelligence, humor, and fantasy, Jacques le Fataliste. The upshot was this Homage to Diderot, which has now been performed throughout the United States and Europe. Here, Jacques and His Master, newly translated by Simon Callow, is a text that will delight Kundera's admirers throughout the English-speaking world. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Festival of Insignificance Milan Kundera, 2023-07-18 “Slender but weighty. . . . What is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living between being and nothingness.”— Boston Globe From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an entertaining and enchanting novel—a fitting capstone on an extraordinary career. (Slate) 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. Readers who know Milan Kundera’s earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the “unserious” in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author’s wife, says to her husband: “you’ve often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it…I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.” Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Curtain Milan Kundera, 2023-07-18 “An elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation. . . . Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion.” —Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review “A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.” In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that “the curtain” represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has—a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. In doing so, he celebrates a prose form that possesses the unique ability to transcend national and language boundaries in order to reveal some previously unknown aspect of human existence. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Art of the Novel Milan Kundera, 2023-06-27 “Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.” — The New Republic Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels. — Milan Kundera Kundera brilliantly examines the evolution, construction, and essence of the novel as an art form through the lens of his own work and through the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Musil, Kafka, and perhaps the least known of all the great novelists of our time, Hermann Broch. 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. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera, 2019-10-03 A new edition of the seminal novel by a literary master, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its first publication. 'One is torn between profound pleasure in the novel's execution and wonder at the pain that inspired it.' Ian McEwan 'A masterpiece.' Salman Rushdie This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage, leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Too Loud a Solitude Bohumil Hrabal, 1992-04-27 A fable about the power of books and knowledge, “finely balanced between pathos and comedy,” from one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular authors (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—the ability to quote the Talmud, Hegel, and Lao-Tzu. In this “irresistibly eccentric romp,” the author Milan Kundera has called “our very best writer today” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word (The New York Times Book Review). |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: No Tomorrow Vivant Denon, 2009-10-13 A Bilingual New York Review Books Original Vivant Denon's No Tomorrow is one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century French libertine literature, a book to set beside Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that where Laclos' icy novel tells of hellish depravity, Denon's ravishing novella is a paradisal diversion. This tale of seduction is itself a seduction, with a plot that could be said to slowly unveil itself before arriving at last at an unexpected consummation. Summoned by Madame de T—— to her country house, the young hero of Denon's novella is taken on a tour of the grounds, only the beginning of a night that not only will be full of unanticipated delights but will give rise to unforeseen, perhaps unanswerable, questions. Lydia Davis's definitive translation of Denon's slim masterpiece is accompanied by the French text. Peter Brooks's illuminating introduction explores the mysteries of No Tomorrow's original publication and the subtleties of Denon's ethics of pleasure. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Testaments Betrayed Milan Kundera, 2023-06-27 A defense of fiction and a lesson in the art of reading. —New York Times Book Review Testaments Betrayed is to be savored paragraph by paragraph. . . . It must be purchased, read, pondered, and argued within the margins. And frequently reread. — Washington Post A brilliant and thought-provoking essay from one of the twentieth century’s masters of fiction, Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator’s wishes. The betrayal of both—often by their most passionate proponents—is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Fra Keeler Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi, 2012-10-09 The debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Necessary Errors Caleb Crain, 2013-08-06 ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal • Slate • Kansas City Star • Flavorwire • Policy Mic • Buzzfeed “Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one’s own youth.”—James Wood, The New Yorker The exquisite debut novel by the author of Overthrow that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague It’s October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He’s arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakia’s revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow. He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them—including Jacob himself. Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crain’s prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood—the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world—and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Laughable Loves Milan Kundera, 1999-08-25 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 devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Milan Kundera's Fiction Karen von Kunes, 2019-05-20 In Milan Kundera’s Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals, Karen von Kunes traces Kundera’s literary aspirations to a single episode in Czechoslovakia in the Stalinist era. This moment attracted international attention when a 1950 police report was released in 2008. Reporters rushed to judgment, accusing Kundera of denouncing Miroslav Dvořáček to the police, resulting in Dvořáček’s immediate arrest and sentencing to hard labor. von Kunes debunks this shocking charge in a systematic way and argues that Kundera reported a suitcase, not a man. She ties Kundera’s dominant themes of sex, betrayal, and political denouncement to the suitcase, a fatal instrument that can lead to paradoxes and unforeseen and catastrophic coincidences for his characters. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Captive Mind Czesław Miłosz, 1959 |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Will Chancellor, 2014-07-08 A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall is an exuberant literary debut--a novel of real ideas and a playful examination of our in-between world, one that explores the nature of family, identity, art, and belief while also marking the introduction of an original new voice in contemporary fiction. Owen Burr is the six-foot-eight, Olympics-bound senior captain of the Stanford University water polo team. In his final collegiate match, however, he suffers a catastrophic injury that destroys his hopes and dreams, flattening his entire world into two dimensions. His identity as an athlete erased but his ambition indelible, he defies his father, a classics professor who lives in a cave of his own making, and moves to Berlin with naive plans to make conceptual art. Then he disappears. Without a single clue as to his son's location, Dr. Burr embarks upon a tour of public lectures from Greece to Germany to Iceland in an attempt to draw out his endangered son. Instead, he foments a violent uprising. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting Khushwant Singh, Milan Kundera, 2004-08-01 `This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels.' The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the most secret of Kundera's novels. This new translation is the first to be authorized by Milan Kundera. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Last Enchantments Charles Finch, 2014-01-28 The Last Enchantments is a powerfully moving and lyrically written novel. A young American embarks on a year at Oxford and has an impassioned affair that will change his life forever After graduating from Yale, William Baker, scion of an old line patrician family, goes to work in presidential politics. But when the campaign into which he's poured his heart ends in disappointment, he decides to leave New York behind, along with the devoted, ambitious, and well-connected woman he's been in love with for the last four years. Will expects nothing more than a year off before resuming the comfortable life he's always known, but he's soon caught up in a whirlwind of unexpected friendships and romantic entanglements that threaten his safe plans. As he explores the heady social world of Oxford, he becomes fast friends with Tom, his snobbish but affable flat mate; Anil, an Indian economist with a deep love for gangster rap; Anneliese, a German historian obsessed with photography; and Timmo, whose chief ambition is to become a reality television star. What he's least prepared for is Sophie, a witty, beautiful and enigmatic woman who makes him question everything he knows about himself. For readers who made a classic of Richard Yates's A Good School, Charles Finch's The Last Enchantments is a sweeping novel about love and loss that redefines what it means to grow up as an American in the twenty-first century. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Art of Fiction David Lodge, 2012-04-30 In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Magic Lantern Timothy Garton Ash, 2014-11-06 The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that capture history in the making, written by an author who was witness to some of the most remarkable moments that marked the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Timothy Garton Ash was there in Warsaw, on 4 June, when the communist government was humiliated by Solidarity in the first semi-free elections since the Second World War. He was there in Budapest, twelve days later, when Imre Nagy - thirty-one years after his execution - was finally given his proper funeral. He was there in Berlin, as the Wall opened. And most remarkable of all, he was there in Prague, in the back rooms of the Magic Lantern theatre, with Václav Havel and the members of Civic Forum, as they made their 'Velvet Revolution'. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Cold War from the Margins Theodora Dragostinova, 2021-05-15 In The Cold War from the Margins, Theodora K. Dragostinova reappraises the global 1970s from the perspective of a small socialist state—Bulgaria—and its cultural engagements with the Balkans, the West, and the Third World. During this anxious decade, Bulgaria's communist leadership invested heavily in cultural diplomacy to bolster its legitimacy at home and promote its agendas abroad. Bulgarians traveled the world to open museum exhibitions, show films, perform music, and showcase the cultural heritage and future aspirations of their ancient yet modern country. As Dragostinova shows, these encounters transcended the Cold War's bloc mentality: Bulgaria's relations with Greece and Austria warmed, émigrés once considered enemies were embraced, and new cultural ties were forged with India, Mexico, and Nigeria. Pursuing contact with the West and solidarity with the Global South boosted Bulgaria's authoritarian regime by securing new allies and unifying its population. Complicating familiar narratives of both the 1970s and late socialism, The Cold War from the Margins places the history of socialism in an international context and recovers alternative models of global interconnectivity along East-South lines. Thanks to generous funding from The Ohio State University Libraries and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Writing At Risk Jason Weiss, 1991-10-01 Much has been made of the image of writers in Paris—romanticized and idealized in fiction and on screen, these émigré artists in sidewalk cafés spark our imagination with unusual force. But rarely do the real-life figures speak to us directly to comment on their work, their lives, and their reasons for choosing to live and work in Paris. In these striking interviews, E. M. Cioran, Julio Cortázar, Brion Gysin, Eugène Ionesco, Carlos Fuentes, Jean-Claude Carrière, Milan Kundera, Nathalie Sarraute, and Edmund Jabès do just this as they speak out on the risks they've taken, on their struggles and discoveries, on tradition, challenge, and their near-unanimous status as émigrés. A consummate interviewer, Jason Weiss spoke in depth with these pathbreaking artists regarding their lives, their craft, and their very special relationship to Paris. Their writings were naturally the main focus of investigation, but Weiss' concern was always to build on previous interviews, to deepen certain lines of inquiry and open new ones, to contribute fresh material to the ongoing record. The result is a series of invigorating, detailed portraits that go beyond personality, habits, and pleasures to examine some of the causes and effects in the unique relationship of place and temperament. Writing at Risk suggests that there is more than we suspect binding writers of such disparate cultures and genres...perhaps their attitudes toward writing, perhaps their common attraction to risk. Readers will relish the immediacy of these interviews and will want to (re)discover the work of these exceptional artists. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: When Poets Pray Marilyn McEntyre, 2019-05-28 Two dozen select prayer poems to learn from and live with Poetry and prayer are closely related. We often look to poets to give language to our deepest hopes, fears, losses—and prayers. Poets slow us down. They teach us to stop and go in before we go on. They play at the edges of mystery, holding a tension between line and sentence, between sense and reason, between the transcendent and the deeply, comfortingly familiar. When Poets Pray contains thoughtful meditations by Marilyn McEntyre on choice poems/prayers and poems about prayer. Her beautifully written reflections are contemplative exercises, not scholarly analyses, meant more as invitation than instruc¬tion. Here McEntyre shares gifts that she herself has received from poets who pray, or who reflect on prayer, believing that they have other gifts to offer readers seeking spiritual companionship along our pilgrim way. POETS DISCUSSED IN THIS BOOK Hildegard of Bingen Lucille Clifton Walter Chalmers Smith Robert Frost Wendell Berry Joy Harjo John Donne Gerard Manley Hopkins Said Marilyn McEntyre George Herbert Thomas Merton Denise Levertov Scott Cairns Mary Oliver Marin Sorescu T. S. Eliot Richard Wilbur Francisco X. Alarcon Anna Kamienska Michael Chitwood Psalm 139:1-12 |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: RecordCovid19 Kristopher Lovell, 2023-08-21 RecordCovid19. Historicizing Experiences of the Pandemic provides insights into the experience of the Covid19 pandemic from an historical and sociological perspective. Using the first-hand testimonies submitted as part of the #RecordCovid19 project as its inspiration, the chapters in this edited collection explore and contextualise the initial responses to the Covid19 pandemic. The collection examines people’s relationships with Covid19 as an historical event, including their own experiences of living through history; their relationship with their surroundings, including their relationships with family, the soundscapes and the emotional environments of a pandemic world; the impact and tone of political rhetoric, including the use (and misuse) of wartime myths and language in the United Kingdom; and finally, what lessons can be learnt from how people discuss their own personal stories and what lessons can we draw from previous examples of storytelling in moments of crisis. The result is a fascinating and rich discussion derived from an archive full of idiosyncratic experiences of life changing during the Covid19 pandemic. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Drink and Tell Frederic Yarm, 2012-09 A collection of over 500 drink recipes created and served by more than 40 bars and restaurants in Boston. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Flyover Lives Diane Johnson, 2014-01-16 “[A] vivid . . . quest for roots. . . . Splendid.” —The New York Times Book Review Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of venturing off to see the world—and did. Now having traveled widely and lived part-time in Paris for many years, she is stung when a French friend teases her about Americans’ indifference to history. Could it be true? The j’accuse haunts Diane and inspires her to dig into her family’s past, working back from the Friday night football of her youth to the adventures illuminated in the letters and memoirs of her stalwart pioneer ancestors—beginning with a lonely young soldier who came to America from France in 1711. As enchanting as her bestselling novels, Flyover Lives is a moving examination of identity and the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us. As Johnson pays tribute to her deep Midwestern roots, she captures the perpetual tug-of-war between the magnetic pull of home and our lust for escape and self-invention. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Farewell Party Milan Kundera, 1976 Published simultaneously with Identity, his new novel, here is a masterful new translation of Milan Kundera's most brilliantly plotted and sheerly entertaining novel -- a dark farce of sex, murder, and motherhood. Set in an Old-Fashioned Central European Spa Town, Farewell Waltz follows the lives of eight characters: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American who is at once a saint and a Don Juan; a popular trumpeter and his beautiful obsessively jealous wife; a disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young female ward. Perhaps the most accessible of Milan Kundera's novels, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. Translated from the French text prepared by the author himself a quarter century after the novel was originally written, Farewell Waltz sparkles anew with wit, humor, and irony. A valuable addition to HarperFlamingo's impressive Kundera backlist, it offers readers a chance to discover, or rediscover, one of the very best works of a legendary writer. It is hard to imagine anything more chilling and profound that Kundera's apparent lightheartedness. -- Elizabeth Pochoda Kundera ... remains faithful to this subtle, wily, devious talent for a fiction of 'erotic possibilities. -- New York Times Book Review |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: Looking at Kafka Philip Roth, 1990 |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: SkyMaul Kasper Hauser Comedy Group, Robert Baedeker, John Reichmuth, Dan Klein, James Reichmuth, 2006-10-31 The funniest catalog in America. Guaranteed. Let award-winning comedy troupe Kasper Hauser transport you into the sublime universe that is SkyMaul, where Banana-ganizers and Reality-Canceling Headphones coexist with Crack Pipe Chess Sets and Llamacycles. More than just a catalog parody, SkyMaul explodes with razor-sharp wit, boundless creativity, and a keen eye for the absurd. This smart, edgy satire will earn your laughter again and again. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: In Praise of Forgetting David Rieff, 2016-01-01 A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, inoculate the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds--whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces--neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option--sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget. Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times--the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11--Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy. |
| milan kundera laughter and forgetting: The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard Trevor Cribben Merrill, 2013-03-14 Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera’s place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of “period pieces” that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a previously unexplored dimension of Kundera’s fiction. Building on theorist René Girard’s notion of “triangular desire,” he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive—and bitterly funny—understanding of human attraction. Most works of fiction (and most movies, too) depict passionate feelings as deeply authentic and spontaneous. Kundera’s novels and short stories overturn this romantic dogma. A pounding heart and sweaty palms could mean that we have found “the One” at last—or they could attest to the influence of a model whose desires we are unconsciously borrowing: our amorous predilections may owe less to personal taste or physical chemistry than they do to imitative desire. At once a comprehensive survey of Kundera’s novels and a witty introduction to Girard’s mimetic theory, The Book of Imitation and Desire challenges our assumptions about human motive and renews our understanding of a major contemporary author. |
Milan - Wikipedia
Milan is recognized as a leading alpha global city, with strengths in the fields of art, chemicals, commerce, design, education, entertainment, finance, healthcare, media (communication), …
Milan | History, Population, Climate, Map, & Facts | Britannica
5 days ago · Milan is the capital city of the region of Lombardy in northern Italy. It is the second largest city by population in Italy, behind Rome. It is Italy’s leading financial centre and its most …
Yesmilano.it the official website for the promotion of the city of ...
All information on the city of Milan: itineraries, monuments, exhibitions, events, maps, transport and curiosities to help you prepare your trip.
Milan – Travel guide at Wikivoyage
Milan (Italian: Milano; Milanese: Milan) is financially the most important city in Italy, and home to the Borsa Italiana stock exchange. It is the second most populous city proper in the country, …
Milan: Things to do & Attractions to visit - Italia.it
Milan, the metropolis that finds a perfect and dynamic balance between history and modernity. While it is considered one of the world's fashion and design capitals, as well as a financial hub, …
Milan Travel Guide - AFAR
Nov 29, 2024 · Milan is Italy’s quiet triple threat—capital of fashion, finance, and design. Begin at the heart of the city in the Piazza del Duomo; the rest radiates outward in a mosaic of …
Milan - Milan Travel Guide – Introducing Milan
Milan Travel Guide with up to date information on the city. Discover what to see in Milan and the Lake District, one of Italy's most popular destinations.
Milan, Italy: All You Must Know Before You Go (2025) - Tripadvisor
Welcome to Milan, the Italian capital of fashion! This beautiful city has so much to offer — from history to shopping to gorgeous architecture — but you can still catch its top highlights in a …
Milan - Wikitravel
Jun 5, 2025 · Milan (Italian: Milano) is financially the first most important city in Italy. It has the most populous city proper in the country, but sits at the centre of Italy's largest urban and …
Milan travel guide & inspiration - Lonely Planet
Explore Milan holidays and discover the best time and places to visit. From La Scala to Duomo Di Milan, discover museums, galleries, top-notch shopping and more in our Milan travel guide. …
Milan - Wikipedia
Milan is recognized as a leading alpha global city, with strengths in the fields of art, chemicals, commerce, design, education, entertainment, finance, healthcare, media (communication), …
Milan | History, Population, Climate, Map, & Facts | Britannica
5 days ago · Milan is the capital city of the region of Lombardy in northern Italy. It is the second largest city by population in Italy, behind Rome. It is Italy’s leading financial centre and its most …
Yesmilano.it the official website for the promotion of the city of ...
All information on the city of Milan: itineraries, monuments, exhibitions, events, maps, transport and curiosities to help you prepare your trip.
Milan – Travel guide at Wikivoyage
Milan (Italian: Milano; Milanese: Milan) is financially the most important city in Italy, and home to the Borsa Italiana stock exchange. It is the second most populous city proper in the country, …
Milan: Things to do & Attractions to visit - Italia.it
Milan, the metropolis that finds a perfect and dynamic balance between history and modernity. While it is considered one of the world's fashion and design capitals, as well as a financial hub, …
Milan Travel Guide - AFAR
Nov 29, 2024 · Milan is Italy’s quiet triple threat—capital of fashion, finance, and design. Begin at the heart of the city in the Piazza del Duomo; the rest radiates outward in a mosaic of …
Milan - Milan Travel Guide – Introducing Milan
Milan Travel Guide with up to date information on the city. Discover what to see in Milan and the Lake District, one of Italy's most popular destinations.
Milan, Italy: All You Must Know Before You Go (2025) - Tripadvisor
Welcome to Milan, the Italian capital of fashion! This beautiful city has so much to offer — from history to shopping to gorgeous architecture — but you can still catch its top highlights in a …
Milan - Wikitravel
Jun 5, 2025 · Milan (Italian: Milano) is financially the first most important city in Italy. It has the most populous city proper in the country, but sits at the centre of Italy's largest urban and …
Milan travel guide & inspiration - Lonely Planet
Explore Milan holidays and discover the best time and places to visit. From La Scala to Duomo Di Milan, discover museums, galleries, top-notch shopping and more in our Milan travel guide. …
