Encounter - Softcover

"Compelling essays."--Boston Sunday Globe

"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

"A commanding, compelling collection...Kundera's essays express enduring aesthetic loyalties and provide unexpected aesthetic sparks that remind readers of a fuller range of authentic thought and feeling."--Michael S. Roth, Los Angeles Times

"A remarkable collection that showcases the author's diverse interests and sparkling talent...Kundera looks at the way exile and estrangement impact upon art and creation."--New York Journal of Books

"Cultivated, worldly, charming and spirited...Kundera's values are sane and humane; his impulses generous; his taste, overall, unimpeachable."--Phillip Lopate, San Francisco Chronicle

"Deeply personal and warmly inviting...Encounter serves as a call to arms for a culture on the verge of losing its artistic credibility."--Time Out New York

Encounter is the latest addition to the acclaimed body of literary criticism from beloved author Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being,The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). Novelist Russell Banks writes, “Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority, and range of reference and allusion.” InEncounter, Kundera brilliantly reflects on some of his signature themes and old loves (Rabelais, Fellini, Janacek, Malaparte), on literature, on morality, and on the transformation of civilization as we know it.