Bohumil Hrabal’s short story collection Automat Svět is published by Aiolos in two volumes titled The World of the Automat and Would You Like to See Golden Prague? The translation was made directly from the original text. The stories are presented in full, without any abridgements.
The tales in this collection highlight the range of Hrabal’s major stylistic virtues: his grotesque humour, his often unexpected warmth, his rough-edged style, and the swift pace of his narration.
The thematic core of the stories is alienation, particularly as it affects the working classes.
Deliberately, yesterday and today are blurred, so as to highlight the fact that the source of alienation—wage labour—remains constant and dominant.
Hrabal’s foremost translator into Greek, Nené Psyrouki, captures the author’s idiosyncratic voice as well as his distinctive outlook on life, which has made Hrabal’s characters an inseparable part of world literature.
