Granta 11

What is Milan Kundera's writing about? Sexual conquest and Russian tanks, arousal and totalitarian repression, infidelity and political betrayal, desire and the quiet tragedy of Europe. Kundera is a literary acrobat, a master of paradox and parody. An exile from communism and a critic of the West, a sceptic and irrepressible story-teller, an erotic hedonist whose life is politicized in the extreme, Kundera is as surprising and as unpredictable as the contemporary world he addresses. The current issue of Granta publishes, for the first time in Britain, a collection of Kundera's newest work, representing the range and power of an author whom more and more people have come to recognize as one of the most important writers to have emerged in the last ten years.