{"product_id":"the-curtain-an-essay-in-seven-parts-9780060841959","title":"The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\"An elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation. . . . Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion.\" --Russell Banks, \u003cem\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.\"\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that \"the curtain\" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has--a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHere an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. In doing so, he celebrates a prose form that possesses the unique ability to transcend national and language boundaries in order to reveal some previously unknown aspect of human existence.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKundera, Milan:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - \u003cp\u003eMilan Kundera is the author of the novels \u003cem\u003eThe Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eImmortality\u003c\/em\u003e, and the short-story collection \u003cem\u003eLaughable Loves\u003c\/em\u003e--all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels \u003cem\u003eSlowness, Identity, and Ignorance\u003c\/em\u003e, as well as his nonfiction works \u003cem\u003eThe Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, \u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eEncounter\u003c\/em\u003e, were originally written in French.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harper Perennial","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50491350974738,"sku":"9780060841959","price":10.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_08551f90-42aa-4f09-89f5-308ecddca035.jpg?v=1730539450","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-curtain-an-essay-in-seven-parts-9780060841959","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}