The Festival of Insignificance

Publisher Marketing: From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being "comes""an unexpected and enchanting novel the culmination of his life s work that is a hymn to friendship and an original and humorous commentary on our era and how we live now. Set in Paris today, the novel follows four friends who run into each other in the Luxembourg Gardens, attend parties, and conduct a long-running exchange on sex, desire, history, art, and even the meaning of human existence. As in all novels by this literary master, "The Festival of Insignificance "contains both fiction and a critical commentary on contemporary reality. Alain, one of the friends, is fascinated by the exposed belly buttons of passing women the latest fashion and takes navel-gazing to imaginative, erotic heights. Another, who has just been told that he does not have cancer, tells a friend that his case is terminal. Kundera moves effortlessly from a ferocious parody of Stalinism to playful ridicule of our own times. Neither the Stalinist period nor our own knows how to take a joke, or even how to recognize one. Kundera pokes fun at our sense of self-importance, and one of the friends, Ramon, proposes that we rejoice in the freedom of recognizing our own insignificance. What a liberating thought!"The Festival of Insignificance" takes up all the themes that have informed this great writer s fiction, embracing the comic and laughing at a culture and a society that has lost what is most vital to life: that necessary and seemingly elusive sense of humor." Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 01/01/2015 pg. 71 (EAN 9780062356895, Hardcover) Publishers Weekly 03/23/2015 (EAN 9780062356895, Hardcover) Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2015 (EAN 9780062356895, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Booklist 05/01/2015 pg. 75 (EAN 9780062356895, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Kundera, Milan The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French. Contributor Bio:  Hoxie, Richmond Richmond Hoxie has performed on Broadway in "I m Not Rappaport" and off-Broadway in "The Dining Room", "Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited)", "To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday", and "Landscape with Waitress". On television, he appears frequently in all of the incarnations of "Law and Order". His film work includes "JFK", "Still of the Night", "Without a Trace", and "For Love or Money".