Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Here Kundera proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator's wishes.

"A defense of fiction and a lesson in the art of reading." --New York Times Book Review

"Testaments Betrayed is to be savored paragraph by paragraph. . . . It must be purchased, read, pondered, and argued within the margins. And frequently reread." -- Washington Post

A brilliant and thought-provoking essay from one of the twentieth century's masters of fiction, Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both--often by their most passionate proponents--is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book.