The Czech writer Milan Kundera, b. Apr. 1, 1929, has lived in France since 1975, persuaded to self-exile by the censoring or suppression of his work by the government of his native country. Kundera has long denied any political motivation in his writings, however. His work is always humorous, skeptical, and fundamentally pessimistic in describing the universal human condition, whether under Communism or elsewhere. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979; Eng. trans., 1980) is his most celebrated novel. Other highly regarded works include The Joke (1967; Eng. trans., 1982); Laughable Loves, a collection of short stories originally published in the 1960s (Eng. trans., 1974); Life Is Elsewhere (1969; Eng. trans., 1974); and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984; Eng. trans., 1984). In The Art of the Novel (1988), a collection of essays, Kundera repeats his conviction that the novel must be "autonomous," created independent of any system of political belief.

Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defence of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterises his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and whose work helps us better understand the world. An astute and brilliant reader of fiction, Kundera applies these same gifts to the reading of Francis Bacon's paintings, Leoš Janáček's music, the film of Federico Fellini, as well as to the novels of Philip Roth, Dostoevsky and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. He also takes up challenge of restoring to their rightful place the works of major writers such as Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte whohae fallen into obscurity.

Milan Kundera's signature themes of memory and forgetting , the expericence of exile, and his spirited championing of modernist art mark these essays. Art, he argues, is what we have to cleave to in the face of evil, against the expression of the darker side of human nature. Elegant, startlingly original and provocative, "Encounter" follows Kundera's essay Collections, "The Art of the Nove;", "Testaments Betrayed" and "The Curtain"