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, and the stories are presented in full, without any abridgements.
The collection’s stories highlight the range of Hrabal’s key stylistic qualities: his grotesque humour, his often unexpected warmth, his rough-edged style, and the swift rhythm of his narration.
The thematic core of the stories is alienation, particularly as it affects the working classes.
Deliberately, past and present are blurred so as to emphasize that the source of alienation—wage labour—remains unchanged and dominant.
Hrabal’s foremost translator into Greek, Nené Psyrouki, captures the writer’s distinctive idiom as well as his particular outlook on life, which has made Hrabal’s characters an inseparable part of world literature.
