The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

'A cult figure.' Guardian'A dark and brilliant achievement.' Ian McEwan'Shamelessly clever ... Exhilaratingly subversive and funny.' Independent'A modern classic ... As relevant now as when it was first published. ' John BanvilleA 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.What readers are saying:'Some books change your mind, some change your heart, the very best change your whole world ... A mighty piece of work, that will shape your life forever.''One of the best books I've ever read ... A book about love and life, full of surprises. Beautiful.''This book is going to change your life ... It definitely leaves you with a hangover after you're done reading.''A must read - loved it, such beautiful observations on life, love and sexuality.''Kundera writes about love as if in a trance so the beauty of it is enchanting and dreamy ... Will stay with you forever.''A beautiful novel that helps you understand life better ... Loved it.''One of those rare novels full of depth and insight into the human condition ... Got me reading Camus and Sartre.''One of the best books I have ever read ... An intellectual love story if ever there was one.'

A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

I don't consider myself the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'm certainly not a spoon. I think about things. I put human nature under a microscope. Sometimes to my own peril. And I write about it. And politics, science, cosmology, relationships, sex, coffee, my angst, my weirdness, my cats & anything else that pops or chaps. But I think you will often find me quite humorous. Especially if you like sarcasm.Unless you're just blithely cruising through life, you'll notice there's a lot going on in this macrocosm of existence. This means there's a lot going on the microcosm of my brain. Not that there's anything "micro" about my brain. Anyway-here is a collection in which I share my thoughts, ruminations, suggestions, complaints and epiphanies where these "cosms" are concerned. Wear a helmet.

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Unbearable Lightness of Being with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, an intricate, cyclical novel which charts the lives of Tomas, a successful surgeon, his wife Tereza, his lover Sabina, and Sabina’s lover Franz. The narrative skilfully blends the characters’ experiences of love, political activism and happiness with philosophical musings on the “lightness” of existence, creating an engaging novel which encourages readers to reflect on the meaning of their own lives. Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia, where he had a successful career as a university lecturer and author until the country was invaded by Soviet forces in 1968 following the Prague Spring. His books were banned by the Communist regime, and he moved to France in 1975. He has won a number of prestigious literary awards, including the Jerusalem Prize (1985) and the Czech State Literature Prize (2007). Find out everything you need to know about The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: •A complete plot summary •Character studies •Key themes and symbols •Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

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 ...

The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker - hilarious restaurant reviews by Booker nominee Will Self 'Most food writing and restaurant criticism is concerned with the ideal, with how by cooking this, or dining there, you can somehow ingurgitate a new - or at any rate improved - social, aesthetic and even spiritual persona. I aimed to turn this proposition on its head, and instead of commenting on where and what people would ideally like to eat I would consider where and what they actually did: the ready meals, buffet snacks and - most importantly - fast food that millions of Britons chomp upon in the go-round of their often hurried and dyspeptic lives.' In this selection from his wickedly funny New Statesman Real Meals column, Will Self reviews the chains where most of us go to eat (KFC, Greggs, Yo! Sushi, Pizza Express and their like), delves into the ubiquitous Thai meal and Chicken Tikka Masala, and experiences hotel breakfasts, frozen TV dinners and airline food on our behalf. These are restaurant reviews of the kind you've never read before. Will Self is the author of nine novels including Cock and Bull; My Idea of Fun; Great Apes; How the Dead Live; Dorian, an Imitation; The Book of Dave; The Butt; Walking to Hollywood and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has written five collections of shorter fiction and three novellas: The Quantity Theory of Insanity; Grey Area; License to Hug; The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo; Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys; Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe and Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes. Self has also compiled a number of nonfiction works, including The Undivided Self: Selected Stories; Junk Mail; Perfidious Man; Sore Sites; Feeding Frenzy; Psychogeography; Psycho Too and The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker.

This breathtaking, reverberating survey of human nature finds Kundera still attempting to work out the meaning of life without losing his acute sense of humour. It is one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so.'It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that.' Nicholas Lezard, GQ

'This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels.'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the most secret of Kundera's novels. This new translation is the first to be fully authorized by Milan Kundera.

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty 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. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only 'an insignificant, minuscule particle' of the past, 'and no-one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit'. We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognise. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand. Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.

Laughable Loves is a collection of stories that first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but was then banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs and impulses that can start a terrifying train of events. Sexual attraction is shown as a game that often turns sour, an experience that brings with it painful insights and releases uncertainty, panic, vanity and a constant need for reassurance. Thus a young couple on holiday start a game of pretence that threatens to destroy their relationship, two middle-aged men go in search of girls they don't really want, a young man renews contact with an older woman who feels humiliated by her ageing body, an elderly doctor uses his beautiful wife to increase his attraction and minister to his sexual vanity. In Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera shows himself, once again, as a master of fiction's most graceful illusions and surprises.

Slowness was Milan Kundera's first novel written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows him through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated in time by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and ridiculous.As Kundera's readers would expect, Slowness is at the same time a formidable display of existential analysis. Slowness (and rapidity), discretion (and exhibitionism) are the principal concepts, and those which are to the reader like vital keys for understanding life in our contemporary world.

A marathon dance mix consisting of thousands of mashed up text and image samples, In the House of the Hangman tries to give a taste of what life is like there, where it is impolite to speak of the noose. It is the third part of the life project Zeitgeist Spam. If you can't afford a copy ask me for a pdf.

The Joke, Milan Kundera's first novel, gained him a huge following in his own country, and launched his worldwide literary reputation.'Kundera is the saddest, funniest and most lovable of authors.' The Times

A budding poet and his adoring mother are the central characters of this intriguing early novel by Milan Kundera. He takes us through the young man's fantasies and love affairs in a characteristic tour de force, alive with wit, eroticism and ideas.

Discusses the ethical aspects of literature.

`The authors bring a spark of vitality and life to an area that could be cynically viewed as a series of conflicting fads and fashions....I would recommend anyone in the process of reviewing or designing an entrepreneurship development course to consider the benefits that this book would bring to the teaching process′ - Entrepreneurship and Innovation `Using fiction in the classroom as an approach to stimulating the study of people in organizations is well-established. What this book contributes is a way of exploring some of the existential elements of life in organizations, which are typically difficult to study. It will be on my reading lists. Hopefully, this example, and regrettably few others which exist, will contribute in the long term to the reformulation of how the lived experience of organizational life may be explored in the classroom′ - Leadership & Organization Development Journal Based on courses taught by the authors over many years, this innovative text is a lively and accessible analysis of people at work and the problems they have to confront. The student is introduced to a range of key themes in management such as: power and identity; consumption and bureaucracy; rational choice and meaning all through the medium of characters and situations in contemporary literature. The clear theoretical framework, supported by footnotes, summaries and further reading guides, makes this an introduction to management the student will find useful as well as enjoyable.

Una brillante disección del amor que se ha convertido en uno de los grandes hitos de la literatura contemporánea. Más de 1.000.000 de ejemplares vendidos. Un clásico de la novela contemporánea. La insoportable levedad del ser narra una extraordinaria historia de amor, es decir, de celos, sexo, traiciones, muerte y, también, de las debilidades y paradojas de Teresa, Tomás, Franz y Sabina, cuyos destinos se entrelazan irremediablemente. Los celos de Teresa hacia Tomás, el terco amor de éste por ella -junto con su irrefrenable deseo de otras mujeres-, el idealismo de Franz, amante de Sabina, y la necesidad de Sabina de perseguir una libertad que sólo conduce a una insoportable levedad, se convierten en una reflexión sobre los problemas filosóficos que afectan a nuestra existencia.