Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she explicates the text of "The Hitchhiking Game" and then briefly links it to Kundera's philosophies and the political background of Czechoslovakia.

Milan Kundera's international reputation rests on his novels, not the handful of short stories he wrote in the six years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, when Czechoslovakia experienced a brief period of independence before being invaded by Soviet tanks. Kundera's short stories, collected in Laughable Loves, nevertheless demonstrate some of his important ideas and techniques. Robert A. Morace writes in Reference Guide to Short Fiction that the stories "are in style, structure, and substance clearly the work of an already mature writer who conceives of writing as a series of exploration in form and theme." In "The Hitchhiking...