Download or read book The Unbearable Lightness of Being written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Download or read book Slowness written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Pog written by Padraig Kenny and published by Chicken House. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'One of a kind. Utterly fantastic.' Eoin Colfer on Tin David and Penny's strange new home is surrounded by forest. It's the childhood home of their mother, who's recently died. But other creatures live here ... magical creatures, like tiny, hairy Pog. He's one of the First Folk, protecting the boundary between the worlds. As the children explore, they discover monsters slipping through from the place on the other side of the cellar door. Meanwhile, David is drawn into the woods by something darker, which insists there's a way he can bring his mother back ...
Download or read book Unbearable Lightness written by Portia de Rossi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I didn't decide to become anorexic. It snuck up on me disguised as a healthy diet, a professional attitude. Although there was a certain glamour to anorexics, I didn't want to be one. I just wanted to excel in dieting. And weighing in at 80 pounds on 300 calories a day, I was the best little dieter there ever was." In scalding prose, Portia de Rossi reveals the pain and illness that haunted her for decades. She alternately starved herself and binged, putting her life in danger and lying to herself and everyone around her about the depth of her illness. From her lowest point, Portia began the painful climb back to health and happiness, ultimately falling head over heels in love with Ellen DeGeneres. In this remarkable and landmark book, she tells a story that inspires hope and nourishes the spirit.
Download or read book Together We Will Go written by J. Michael Straczynski and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Breakfast Club meets The Silver Linings Playbook in this powerful, provocative, and heartfelt novel about twelve strangers who come together to make the most of their final days, from New York Times bestselling and award-winning author J. Michael Straczynski. Mark Antonelli, a failed young writer looking down the barrel at thirty, is planning a cross-country road trip. He buys a beat-up old tour bus. He hires a young army vet to drive it. He puts out an ad for others to join him along the way. But this will be a road trip like no other: His passengers are all fellow disheartened souls who have decided that this will be their final journey—upon arrival in San Francisco, they will find a cliff with an amazing view of the ocean at sunset, hit the gas, and drive out of this world. The unlikely companions include a young woman with a chronic pain sensory disorder and another who was relentlessly bullied at school for her size; a bipolar, party-loving neo-hippie; a gentle coder with a literal hole in his heart and blue skin; and a poet dreaming of a better world beyond this one. We get to know them through access to their texts, emails, voicemails, and the daily journal entries they write as the price of admission for this trip. By turns tragic, funny, quirky, charming, and deeply moving, Together We Will Go explores the decisions that brings these characters together, and the relationships that grow between them, with some discovering love and affection for the first time. But as they cross state lines and complications to the initial plan arise, it becomes clear that this is a novel as much about the will to live as it is the choice to end it. The final, unforgettable moments as they hurtle toward the outcomes awaiting them will be remembered for a lifetime.
Download or read book Immortality written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller "Inspired. . . . Kundera's most brilliantly imagined novel. . . . A book that entrances, beguiles and charms us from first page to last." — Cleveland Plain Dealer 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. 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.
Download or read book The Mind Parasites written by Colin Wilson and published by Monkfish Book Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilson has blended H.P. Lovecraft's dark vision with his own revolutionary philosophy and unique narrative powers to produce a stunning, high-tension story of vaulting imagination. A professor makes a horrifying discovery while excavating a sinister archaeological site. For over 200 years, mind parasites have been lurking in the deepest layers of human consciousness, feeding on human life force and steadily gaining a foothold on the planet. Now they threaten humanity's extinction. They can be fought with one weapon only: the mind, pushed to--and beyond--its limits. Pushed so far that humans can read each other's thoughts, that the moon can be shifted from its orbit by thought alone. Pushed so that man can at last join battle with the loathsome parasites on equal terms.
Download or read book The JOKE written by Milan Kundera and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1993-02-26 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth written by Malcolm Pryce and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-09-06 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is nothing unusual about the barrel-organ man who walks into private detective Louie Knight's office. Apart from the fact that he has lost his memory. And his monkey is a former astronaut. And he is carrying a suitcase that he is too terrified to open. And he wants a murder investigated. The only thing unusual about the murder is that it took place a hundred years ago. And needs solving by the following week. Louie is too smart to take on such a case but also too broke to turn it down. Soon he is lost in a labyrinth of intrigue and terror, tormented at every turn by a gallery of mad nuns, gangsters and waifs, and haunted by the loss of his girlfriend, Myfanwy, who has disappeared after being fed drugged raspberry ripple ...
Download or read book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 written by Daniel R. Schwarz and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the modern European novel from a renowned English literature scholar Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 is an engaging, in-depth examination of the evolution of the modern European novel. Written in Daniel R. Schwarz's precise and highly readable style, this critical study offers compelling discussions on a wide range of major works since 1900 and examines recurring themes within the context of significant historical events, including both World Wars and the Holocaust. The author cites important developments in the evolution of the modern novel and explores how these paradigmatic works of fiction reflect intellectual and cultural history, including developments in painting and cinema. Schwarz focuses on narrative complexity, thematic subtlety, and formal originality as well as how novels render historical events and cultural developments Discussing major works by Proust, Camus, Mann, Kafka, Grass, di Lampedusa, Bassani, Kertesz, Pamuk, Kundera, Saramago, Muller and Ferrante, Schwarz explores how these often experimental masterworks pay homage to the their major predecessors—discussed in Schwarz's ground-breaking Reading the European Novel to 1900—even while proposing radical departures from realism in their approach to time and space, their testing the limits of language, and their innovative ways of rendering the human psyche. Written for teachers and students by a highly-acclaimed scholar and including valuable study questions, Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 offers a guide for a deeper understanding of how these original modern masters respond to both the past and present.
Download or read book Cinematic Overtures written by Annette Insdorf and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great movie’s first few minutes provide the key to the rest of the film. Like the opening paragraphs of a novel, they draw the viewer in, setting up the thematic concerns and stylistic approach that will be developed over the course of the narrative. A strong opening sequence leads the viewer to trust the filmmakers. Other times, opening shots are intentionally misleading as they invite alert, active participation with the film. In Cinematic Overtures, Annette Insdorf discusses the opening sequence so that viewers turn first impressions into deeper understanding of cinematic technique. From Joe Gillis’s voice-over in Sunset Boulevard as he lies dead in a swimming pool to the hallucinatory opening of Apocalypse Now, from the stream-of-consciousness montage as found in Hiroshima, mon amour to the slowly unfolding beginning of Schindler’s List, Cinematic Overtures analyzes opening shots from a range of Hollywood as well as international films. Insdorf pays close attention to how the viewer makes sense of these scenes and the cinematic world they are about to enter. Including dozens of frame enlargements that illustrate the strategies of opening scenes, Insdorf also examines how films explore and sometimes critique the power of the camera’s gaze. Along with analyses of opening scenes, the book offers a series of revelatory and surprising readings of individual films by some of the leading directors of the past seventy-five years. Erudite but accessible, Cinematic Overtures will lead film scholars and ardent movie fans alike to greater attentiveness to those fleeting opening moments.
Download or read book Ignorance written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Download or read book The Art of the Novel written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Download or read book Birds of America written by Lorrie Moore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs: A collection of twelve stories that’s “one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability" (The New York Times Book Review). A volume by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language. From the opening story, "Willing"—about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being—Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. In the story "Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People" ("There is nothing as complex in the world—no flower or stone—as a single hello from a human being"), a woman newly separated from her husband is on a long-planned trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of wisdom and success that her mother has always put forth slips away to reveal the panicky woman she really is. In "Charades," a family game at Christmas is transformed into a hilarious and insightful (and fundamentally upsetting) revelation of crumbling family ties. In "Community Life,"a shy, almost reclusive, librarian, Transylvania-born and Vermont-bred, moves in with her boyfriend, the local anarchist in a small university town, and all hell breaks loose. And in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," a woman who goes through the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat (Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by her friends as really mourning other issues: the impending death of her parents, the son she never had, Bosnia.
Download or read book Encounter written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I can’t imagine reading this book without being challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately delighted.” —John Simon, New York Times Book Review Milan Kundera’s brilliant collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterizes his bestselling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better understand what it means to be human. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter combines many of the author’s signature themes with personal reflections and stories.
Download or read book Identity written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
