His new book, “Day,” is his first in nearly a decade. “How does anybody,” he said, “write a contemporary novel that’s about human beings that’s not about the pandemic?”
Her best-known book, “Het Bittere Kruid” (“Bitter Herbs”), described her experiences as a young woman after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.
Her collection “Crime Against Nature,” which recounts her losing custody of her children after she came out, made her a literary star — and a target of conservatives.
The author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” he was known for sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in his native Czechoslovakia.