Milan Kundera

Fin Dolan aspires to something meaningful, but he can't put his finger on what it might be. He is chronically unattached, generally the smartest person in the room, and employed by a New York media company that offers endless opportunities for mockery....

Michael Henry Heim, a well regarded scholar of Slavic languages at UCLA known for his translations of works by Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Thomas Mann and Anton Chekhov, has died. He was 69. Heim died Saturday at his home in......

Michael Henry Heim, a literary translator and humble philanthropist whose teaching, activism and widely admired translations of works by such writers as Günter Grass and Milan Kundera helped bring the voices of contemporary world literature into the...

Earlier this year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a 100-book required reading list for his compatriots, it provoked anxiety, rekindling memories of Soviet-era censorship. The furor underscored an important point: that literature plays a...

House of Holes A Book of Raunch Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster: 262 pp., $25 Nicholson Baker wasn't kidding when he subtitled "House of Holes," his new novel, "A Book of Raunch." Indeed, it's a bona fide filth-fest, so unrelentingly graphic that...

We're just a few days from April 1, a notorious time for hoaxes. We could have waited, but we figured you might not trust these 10 facts if they were printed on April Fools' Day. All indeed are true. Really. No kidding. We promise. 1. The origin of April...

The fairgrounds sale is now in its 18th mind-numbing month. Still, it is difficult to understand the events leading up to today. As one who spent that 18 months at the vortex, I will spare you the hundreds of details, save for a few, even though there are...

JUNE Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl Daniel Pinkwater Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pinkwater brings a magical realist perspective to YA fiction in the third volume of the series that begins with "The Yggyssey" and "The Neddiad." The Clock Without a...

Slaugterhouse 90210, a tumblr blog and column at Details, takes images from pop culture and captions them, hysterically, with literary quotes. A picture of Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) from "Miami Vice" is accompanied by...

It was surely only a matter of time. The noisy partisan divide that seems to infect everything in America today -- from what health care plan you want to what car you drive -- has surfaced again. As soon as......

In 1999, the L.A. Times asked dozens of writers to look back at the prior century and share books they considered lost treasures -- books they loved that had slipped out of sight. Although the authors were formidable -- including......

During what has been one of the toughest news weeks for Israel in recent memory, daily newspaper Haaretz has let novelists and cultural critics step into its pages. The invitations to Margaret Atwood, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jonathan Safran Foer, Milan...