Peter Hargitai – författare

In all that is banal and bathetic lurks the heroic as in the story of Attila Nagy whose mad forays into time sound the horn of prophecy. The visionary path its author Peter Hargitai cuts into time intersects with Nostradamus famous Epistle and with contemporary history: The great empire of the Antichrist will begin where Attila and Xerxes descended.--Nostradamus (from the Epistle to Henry II)

Hargitai maintains a high level of tension; with arrogant abandon he plays out his tricks and his intricate cat-and-mouse game on the reader with huge success. So deft are his embroidery of metaphors and redressing of myths that we give credence to the most outrageous bluffs, mythical occurrences, pseudomagic, drug-induced psychedelic visions, inexplicable apparitions, and a bevy of layers-thick concealments Few can convey the madness of the New World with such absurd dexterity, and such a keen sense of irony and the grotesque. This mischievous, iconoclastic sorcerer manages to mesmerize everybody.--World Literature Today

In this bat-mad collection of twisted tales, Peter Hargitai lets out all the stops: he is irreverent, funny, and irresistible. Learn about the real Vlad the Impaler and his poor performance on the Hamilton Depression Scale due to Dracula wannabees like Bla Lugosi; goddesses pursuing shepherds hunkering after sheep; straight serpent-like creatures and gay super-heroes; tattooed dragon slayers, medieval shepherds whose lies tell the truth, talking cocks stalking Turkish emperors; an artistic lad who wants to be called Andr and join the Merchant Marine in land-locked Transylvania; a blind princess under the spell of an evil sorceress; a blood countess who wants to be forever young through a combination of Botox and an Iron Maiden. And one damsel who fulfills her impossible dream of becoming a king after a sex-change operation in nearby Serbia.

Who Let the Bats Out? Twisted Tales from Transylvania, a hilarious tweaking of folk tales from the Hungarian oral tradition, will make you laugh out loud on every page. They are about fantastical beings as in the story of Hunor and Magor, twin hunters who come to earth like two falling stars, obsessed by the behind of a magical white hind. The elusive creature leads them to a meadow of beautiful moon maidens they are destined to marry were it not for their forbidding pre-nuptials...

PETER HARGITAIs work, both in scope and in style, remains well outside the pale of current poetic fashion including the McPoems of MFA mills and the lip- tongue- ear literature of hiphop. Influenced by the great Hungarian poet Attila Jzsefs obsession with the eternal mother as a metaphor for all human longing, Hargitai probes the nature of spiritual exile on terms that are neither Freudian nor Jungian, American, or Hungarian, but on terms that are uniquely personal and movingly human.

If traditional confessional poetry, now considered classical, had its halcyon days in the work of Roethke, Lowell, and Plath, it can be said to have reached a new, ethnically charged peak in the work of Peter Hargitai.

Pembroke Magazine

Peter Hargitai is a remarkable versatile and humanely touching poet with a truly distinctive style and voice. These deeply probing intellectual poems exhibit an impressive range and vivacity of genres."

The narrative revolves around a Hungarian refugee who arrives in America after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Young Attila struggles to make sense of life as an adolescent, but also within his family who are neither Hungarian nor American, but who seem to live in a separatist community of Hungarian-Americans bottled up in a historical and political time warp. Caught between two worlds, his past and his present, Attila''s conflict comes to a head when he falls in love with the "wrong" girl. His deep love for Lyudmila pits him against everything his family believes in, his religion, and the call to arms in an unjust war. And the final pages of the novel reveal secrets that explain much of what Attila was really fighting against - and what he was fighting for. This remarkable book keeps the reader fascinated until the very end.