Principal Works
Zert [The Joke, 1969; definitive English edition, 1992] (novel) 1967
*Smesne lasky [Laughable Loves; first English edition, 1974; definitive English edition, 1987] (short stories) 1970
†La vie est ailleurs [Life Is Elsewhere, 1974; definitive English edition, 1986] (novel) 1973
†La valse aux adieux [The Farewell Party; first English edition, 1976; new translation by Aaron Asher, based on Kundera's revised French text, published as Farewell Waltz: A Novel, 1998] (novel) 1976
†Le livre du rire et de l'oubli [The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980; new translation by Aaron Asher, 1996] (novel) 1979
†Jacques et son maître: Hommage a Denis Diderot [Jacques and His Master, 1985] (drama) 1981
†L'insoutenable l'égèreté de l'être [The Unbearable Lightness of Being] (novel) 1984
L'art du roman [The Art of the Novel, 1988] (essays) 1986
†L'immortalite [Immortality, 1991] (novel) 1990
Les Testaments trahis [Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, 1995] (essay) 1993
La Lenteur [Slowness, 1996] (novel) 1995
L'identite [Identity, 1998] (novel) 1997
*Kundera collected the eight stories contained in the original Czech edition of this work from three notebooks of short stories: Smesne lasky (“Laughable Loves”), 1963, Druhy sesit smesnych lasek (“The Second Notebook of Laughable Loves”), 1965, and Treti sesit smesnych lasek (“The Third Notebook of Laughable Loves”), 1968. The original notebooks comprised ten stories; translated editions contain only seven stories.
†These works are French translations from the original Czech manuscripts Zivot je jinde, Valcik na rozloucenou, Kniha smichu a zapomneni, Jakub a jeho pan, Nesnesitelna lehkost byti, and Nesmrtelnost, respectively.
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