Laughable Loves

Synopsis

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera is a collection of seven masterful short stories which were banned upon their appearance in 1968.

A dazzling collection of stories – originally banned in 1968 Prague – by a ‘magnificent short-story writer’ (NYT) and author of classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

‘Kundera is a self-confessed hedonist in a world beset by politics . . . Marvellous.’ Salman Rushdie

‘Kundera’s achievement has been to bring both private life and political life into one comic framework.‘ Ian McEwan

On holiday, a man and his girlfriend pretend she is a hitchhiking stranger – but their game soon makes them strangers to each other.
One young man reconnects with his grieving former lover, only to be shocked by her ageing body.
Two friends embark on an obsessive mission to seduce as many women as possible in the Eternal Chase.
A teacher fakes piety to seduce a devoutly religious girl: then jilts her and yearns for God.
In these celebrated stories, Kundera probes our darkest erotic impulses and most destructive sexual fantasies – while seducing us with his graceful, whimsical prose.

Author

Milan Kundera, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a student when the Czech Communist regime was established in 1948, and later worked as a labourer, jazz musician and professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague. After the Russian invasion in August 1968, his books were proscribed. In 1975, he and his wife settled in France, and in 1981, he became a French citizen. 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 of the short-story collection Laughable Loves – all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.