A brilliant new contribution to Kundera's ongoing reflections on art and artists, written with unparalleled insight, authority, and range of reference and allusion Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels, Kundera revisits the artists who remain important to him and whose works help us better understand the world we live in and what it means to be human. An astute reader of fiction, Kundera brings his extraordinary critical gifts to bear on the paintings of Francis Bacon, the music of Leos Janacek, and the films of Federico Fellini, as well as the novels of Philip Roth, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restoring to its rightful place the work of Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte, major writers who have fallen into obscurity. Milan Kundera's signature themes of memory and forgetting, the experience of exile, and the championing of modernist art are here, along with more personal reflections and stories. Encounter is a work of great humanism. Art is what we possess in the face of evil and the darker side of human nature. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter follows in the footsteps of Kundera's earlier essay collections, The Art of the Novel , Testaments Betrayed , and The Curtain .

米蘭·昆德拉（MILAN KUNDERA 1929— ）

一九二九年齣生於捷剋斯洛伐剋布爾諾，父親是鋼琴傢、音樂學院校長，昆德拉在童年時就受到良好的音樂熏陶和教育。

一九六七年，他的第一部長篇小說《玩笑》在捷剋齣版，獲得巨大成功，從此奠定在當代文壇的重要地位。一九七五年，昆德拉離開捷剋，定居法國，他的長篇小說《生活在彆處》、《告彆圓舞麯》、《笑忘錄》、《不能承受的生命之輕》，以及短篇小說集《好笑的愛》的原作以捷剋文寫成；長篇小說《慢》、《身份》和《無知》，還有隨筆集《小說的藝術》、《被背叛的遺囑》和《相遇》的原作以法文寫成。另著有戲劇《雅剋和他的主人》。

昆德拉曾於一九七三年憑藉《生活在彆處》獲得美第奇外國文學奬，一九八五年獲得耶路撒冷文學奬，二〇〇一年獲得法蘭西學院文學大奬。