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Milan Kundera’s first novel in 13 years, The Festival of Insignificance, will be published in Linda Asher’s English translation next month and the New Yorker has just published an excerpt, though it’s being promoted as a short story, “The Apologizer”. The novel was published in Italy in 2013 and then in France and Spain. Bulgarian […]

“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” This is Harry Lime’s line of shameless […]