The Collected Stories (essays) / The Art of the Novel
Milan Kundera · 1988
Kundera's essays are novels in miniature, meditations on Cervantes, Kafka, and the novel's possibilities. "The Art of the Novel" and "Testaments Betrayed" are essential for anyone thinking about prose narrative.
The case against
Pronouncements arrive ex cathedra, unargued; disagree and you are simply a bad reader. Kundera's history of the novel runs from Cervantes through Broch and culminates, with suspicious convenience, in Kundera, a canon admitting almost no women and little beyond Central Europe's taste. Bracing as criticism; as self-portrait, more revealing than he intended.
Essays · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
