Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman, now a widow, who escaped him fifteen years earlier. Neither of them doubts that the day will end in disgust, but for one intimate moment each finds a way to overcome mortality. Written in 1969, before Milan Kundera was known to English-speaking readers, this story renders male and female characters painful equals, and prompted Philip Roth to admire its 'detached Chekhovian tenderness'. Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.
Author
People best know Czech-born writer Milan Kundera for his novels, including The Joke (1967), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism. Since 1975, he lived in exile in France and in 1981 as a naturalized citizen. Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. The Communist government of Czechoslovakia censored and duly banned his books from his native country, the case until the downfall of this government in the velvet revolution of 1989.
