Bohumil Hrabal: Storytellers

Minumsa has published Storytellers, a representative collection of Bohumil Hrabal’s fiction marking the 110th anniversary of his death. The Czech Republic is a literary powerhouse that produced world-renowned twentieth-century writers such as Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Karel Čapek, and Jaroslav Hašek. Among them, Hrabal, a novelist who wrote in Czech, is one of his country’s most beloved national authors. His novels have been translated into more than 30 languages and sold three million copies worldwide. Although his works circulated in censored editions, underground publications, and editions published abroad under the artistic directives imposed by Czechoslovakia’s socialist regime, his international reputation continued to grow. He is now regarded as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Storytellers includes Closely Watched Trains, considered Hrabal’s greatest masterpiece, along with short stories infused with his characteristically freewheeling imagination. Four stories—“Storytellers,” “The Funeral,” “Iontophoresis,” and “Diamond Eyes”—had not previously been introduced because they were difficult to translate from Czech into Korean; they are appearing in Korean for the first time in this collection. Closely Watched Trains was adapted into a film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967. Hrabal is well known in Korea for Too Loud a Solitude. For readers who are not yet familiar with Eastern European fiction, Storytellers makes an excellent introduction; for Hrabal’s admirers, it will be a treasured collection. “Bohumil Hrabal shows us the most captivating Prague, one you can find nowhere else. He connects the humor of ordinary people with dramatically theatrical imagination.” —Milan Kundera

Korean title: 이야기꾼들

Korean author: 보후밀 흐라발

Korean publisher: 민음사

ISBN-13: 9788937456565