The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classics)

The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classics)

Milan Kundera
$16.99
Publication Date: April 1st, 2003
Publisher:
Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ISBN:
9780060093747
Pages:
176

Description

“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.

About the Author

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

Praise for The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classics)

“Lucid, detached, and epigrammatic …The book has its author’s familiar swiftness and variety of attack and his elegant, provocative irony.” — The New Yorker

“Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.” — The New Republic

“Highly readable, provocative, and of inspirational force.” — Anthony Burgess

“Kundera writes with wisdom and force.” — The Village Voice

“Refreshing, unorthodox, valuable. Incandescent illumination by one of literature’s most important voices.” — Kirkus Reviews

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