The author of the celebrated novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and, my personal favorite of his novels, “Ignorance,” Milan Kundera is a writer whose work I always look forward to reading. His new book, “Encounter,” is a mix of essays and short stories. In it, Kundera offers his personal reflections on artists and writers who have been important to him. In one essay, he compares Philip Roth with Fyodor Dostoevsky; in another, he looks at the contributions to cinema made by the Lumiere brothers and Fellini. As often in his work, he examines memory and forgetting and he offers his thoughts on the experience of living in exile, posing the question at what point when a writer emigrates -- as Kundera did years ago from Czechoslovakia to France -- does he stop being one nationality and become another. Kundera’s thoughts on the definition of modernism in art and literature, his preference for the term “prose writer” over “novelist,” are interesting, as are many of his comments on artists and writers, yet some of the writers and artists he discusses are little known to the general public. For myself, and, I suspect for many other readers, this book is more academic than accessible. In that respect, it may disappoint some of his long-time fans.