The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliateThe 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.
"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
"This book, as it bluntly calls itself, is brilliant and original, written with the purity and wit that invite us directly in." -- John Updike
"A masterpiece." -- Salman Rushdie
"An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level--political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." -- Newsweek