The bestselling modern classic, Milan Kundera’s iconic novel of love and politics in communist Czechoslovakia.

A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon; a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals; while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight – and we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being encompasses passion and philosophy, infidelity and ideas, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy – in fact, all of human existence.

In twelve dreams, Robert, a boy who hates math, meets a Number Devil, who leads him to discover the amazing world of numbers: infinite numbers, prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, numbers that magically appear in triangles, and numbers that expand without end. As we dream with him, we are taken further and further into mathematical theory, where ideas eventually take flight, until everyone -- from those who fumble over fractions to those who solve complex equations in their heads -- winds up marveling at what numbers can do.

The Joke, Milan Kundera's first novel, gained him a huge following in his own country and launched his worldwide literary reputation. In his foreword Kundera explains why this completely revised translation is the definitive edition of his work. 'It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. The author of The Joke is clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie, Observer

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 private actions, but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

Collection of Jan Neruda's intimate, wry, bitter-sweet stories of life among the inhabitants of Mala Strana, the Little Quarter of nineteenth century Prague. These finely tuned and varied vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth century realist, the Charles Dickens of a Prague becoming ever more aware of itself as a Czech, rather than an Austrian city. Prague Tales is a classic story whose influence has been acknowledged by generations of Czech writers, including Ivan Klima, who has contributed an introduction to this new translation.

Adventures in Immediate Irreality, the masterwork of Max Blecher a magnificent writer who brings to mind Bruno Schulz paints in vivid colors the crises of irreality that plagued him in his youth, eerie mirages wherein he would glimpse future events, glowing glimpses unsettling in every way. In gliding chapters that move with a peculiar dream logic of their own, this memoiristic novella sketches the tremulous, frightening and exhilarating awakenings of a very young man."

First published in 1973, this collection of Chekhov's correspondence is widely regarded as the best introduction to this great Russian writer. Weighted heavily toward the correspondence dealing with literary and intellectual matters, this extremely informative collection provides fascinating insight into Chekhov's development as a writer. Michael Henry Heim's excellent translation and Simon Karlinsky's masterly headnotes make this volume an essential text for anyone interested in Chekhov.

The most famous collection of short fiction by acclaimed Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis. In these nine stories Kis depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapes--the multitude of details that make up a human life. Kis combines fiction and history in postmodern style, and in a postscript provides fascinating historical backgrounds and other notes for the reader that add interest and context. An enduring classic of Slavic literary fiction.