Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Laughable Loves | 1970 | Milan Kundera | Buy |
| 2 | A Kidnapped West | 1983 | Milan Kundera | Buy |
| 3 | 89 Words followed by Prague, A Disappearing Poem | 2025 | Milan Kundera | Buy |
Laughable Loves (1970) is Kundera’s major collection of short fiction and one of the essential books of Central European literature. The seven stories are set in Communist Czechoslovakia and center on sexual politics – the pursuit of desire, the performance of identity, and the small deceptions that structure everyday life. Kundera treats these encounters with a combination of sympathy and irony that is characteristic of his best work.
A Kidnapped West (1983) is a shorter political essay that Kundera published in French, arguing that Central Europe – defined by its shared cultural inheritance of skepticism, irony, and pluralism – had been cut off from the Western tradition it belonged to by Soviet occupation. The essay generated considerable debate at the time of publication and remains a key document in arguments about European identity.
The third item in this grouping, 89 Words followed by Prague, A Disappearing Poem (2025), is a late posthumous publication. Kundera’s collections as a whole show the range of his interests beyond the novel form – from the short story to the political essay to prose poetry – and give a fuller picture of his career than the novels alone.