October 23, 1956 For 12 days, countless Hungarian teenagers fought in the bloody Hungarian Revolution against Communist tyranny and overwhelming Soviet armor. They set up tank barricades, tossed Molotov cocktails, and with their confiscated Russian submachine guns made a stand on the streets of Budapest, hoping to hold out until help arrived from the West. But there was no help. Nobody came to their aid. This is the story of one such brave freedom fighter-a 14 year-old girl. "For 12 days in 1956, the Hungarian people caught a fleeting glimpse of their independence. Armed with little more than a love of liberty, the impatient patriots of Hungary rose up against the mighty Soviet empire. They stormed the jails and they freed political prisoners. For 12 days, there was hope, but then came the response and it was terrible and ferocious. Soviet troops and tanks rumbled into Hungary, killing tens of thousands of people and condemning thousands of others to Siberian gulags." Condoleezza Rice U.S. Secretary of State "We have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for." Albert Camus "On the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, Peter Hargitai's newest novel, "Daughter of the Revolution," captures the spirit of that time as it follows the Cheetah, a 14 year-old schoolgirl turned revolutionary who takes on the tanks and machine guns of the Soviet Red Army." Richard A. Schwartz, author of "Cold War Reference Guide, Cold War Culture," and a political novel, "The Conflicted Liberal"

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 Bela 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 Andre 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 HARGITAI's 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 Jozsef's 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. Praise for Peter Hargitai's Mother Tongue: A Broken-Hungarian Love Song:

"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." Laurence Lieberman Poetry Editor University of Illinois Press

AMAZING PROPHECY HIDDEN IN NOVEL
By the author who foretold 911 and the Twin Towers meltdown

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)

Praise for Editor s Choice Author Peter Hargitai:
This deliciously ironic, picaresque tale borders on the bizarre, but Hargitai is a language master capable of effortless shifts from reality to myth This genre-bending novel is a pleasure to read. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.
--Library Journal

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

October 23, 1956 For 12 days, countless Hungarian teenagers fought in the bloody Hungarian Revolution against Communist tyranny and overwhelming Soviet armor. They set up tank barricades, tossed Molotov cocktails, and with their confiscated Russian submachine guns made a stand on the streets of Budapest, hoping to hold out until help arrived from the West. But there was no help. Nobody came to their aid. This is the story of one such brave freedom fighter-a 14 year-old girl. "For 12 days in 1956, the Hungarian people caught a fleeting glimpse of their independence. Armed with little more than a love of liberty, the impatient patriots of Hungary rose up against the mighty Soviet empire. They stormed the jails and they freed political prisoners. For 12 days, there was hope, but then came the response and it was terrible and ferocious. Soviet troops and tanks rumbled into Hungary, killing tens of thousands of people and condemning thousands of others to Siberian gulags." Condoleezza Rice U.S. Secretary of State "We have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for." Albert Camus "On the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, Peter Hargitai's newest novel, "Daughter of the Revolution," captures the spirit of that time as it follows the Cheetah, a 14 year-old schoolgirl turned revolutionary who takes on the tanks and machine guns of the Soviet Red Army." Richard A. Schwartz, author of "Cold War Reference Guide, Cold War Culture," and a political novel, "The Conflicted Liberal"

"Sensitive and powerful, Peter Hargitai's novel "Millie" brims with passion and wit. Its hero, Art Nagy, is a Hungarian Alex Portnoy, forging anew an identity on the edge of two cultures."Millie" is destined to take a distinguished place on the shelf of world literature."
-Lili Bita
Author of "Sister of Darkness" "In this darkly comic novel about a refugee boy's coming-of-age in 1960's America, Peter Hargitai does for Cleveland's Hungarians what Herbert Gold did for its Jews-bring to life the quirks, prejudices, and strivings of a people struggling to make it in an alien land."
-Sanford J. Smoller
Contributing editor of "Pembroke Magazine" and author of "Adrift Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon, Writer and Publisher of the Twenties" "Hargitai's prose is swift, sure, and irresistible. Reminiscent of Kundera."
-"Apalachee Quarterly" PETER HARGITAI's "Millie" is a novel that touches the heart. In a story of the quintessential American dream, immigration, Hargitai tells of the coming-of-age of Art Nagy, a young Hungarian who arrives in America after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against Soviet-Communist occupation. Art struggles to make sense of life not only as an adolescent but also within his family who insist on transplanting many of their customs and much of their thinking from their country of origin, including less than attractive ideas about race and class. Art's likes and dislikes and the friends he chooses bring the family to clash over values and beliefs, and culminate in tragedy when he falls in love with a girl from a different background. His deep love for Millie pits him against everything his family believes in.. And the final pages of the novel reveal acts of horror in his family's past and explain much of what Art Nagy was up against. Every page keeps the reader fascinated, unable to put it down until the very end. Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, Editor
Comparative Cultural Studies Series
Purdue University Press

Award-winning translator Peter Hargitai celebrates 100 years of Attila Jozsef (1905-1937) in this new selection of 100 poems. His previous selection, Perched On Nothing's Branch (1986), enjoyed a remarkable run of five editions and won for him the Academy of American Poets' Landon Translation Award. His translation of Attila Jozsef is listed among the world classics cited by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon. Praise for Peter Hargitai's translation of Attila Jozsef: These grim, bitter, iron-cold poems emerge technically strong, spare and authentic in English, and they are admirably contemporary in syntax. - May Swenson in Citation for the Academy of American Poets. A rich nuanced translation by Peter Hargitai. These poems are ageless, mirroring the human conditions and focusing in humankind's existential loneliness. - Maxine Kumin. I have long thought of Attila Jozsef as one of the great poets of the century, a tragic realist whose work beautifully redeemed the unbearable conditions of the life to which history condemned him. These new translations by Peter Hargitai will be welcomed by Jozsef's admirers and will certainly add to their number. - Donald Justice. Hargitai's versions are colloquial and emotionally charged as the originals. Reading them one lapses into the silence that attends the reception of all great poetry. - David Kirby.

Does the past decide the future? When East meets West, the clash determines whether Attila becomes the barbarian of history and religion or a hero who forges his own destiny. The love of a woman, a woman of his own choosing, can either destroy him and his family or make him a warrior that battles for his own heart.

American Academy of Poets award-winning poet-translator Peter Hargitai considers the raging, aging child in this highly original collection of poems. His earlier work was listed in Yale critic Harold Bloom's prestigious