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Kundera, Milan; Roth, Philip; Rappaport, Suzanne (trans.).
Laughable Loves [from the library of David Lodge].
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York;
Date of Publication: 1974
Stock Code: 15036
First American edition, and the first edition in English. Octavo, pp., 242, [4]. Publisher’s original terracotta cloth, titled in gilt to spine, and in blind to upper board, top edge dyed red, in the original unclipped pictorial jacket. From the library of David Lodge, with his occasional underlining in pencil. Offprint of Lodge’s ‘Milan Kundera, and the idea of the author in modern criticism’ loosely inserted. Slight shelf-wear to head and tail of spine panel of jacket. Gilt dulled. Contents clean. A near-fine copy in like jacket. Published 5 years after the first Czech edition and published as part of Philip Roth’s ‘Writers from Other Europe’ series this short story collection first introduced Kundera to the Anglophone world. From the library of author and critic David Lodge (1935-2025), who first wrote about Kundera in the offprint tipped into this volume (Lodge’s article was originally published in Critical Quarterly, vol. 26: 1-2), he would go on to discuss Kundera’s work in his 1992 book The Art of Fiction. Lodge no doubt consulted this copy when preparing both works. £125.00