May 27: “We Shall Meet at the Crossroads, Where Nothing and Everything Grows: Imaginations of Nature and Culture in the Hungarian New Weird.”

The talk explores the poetics of Hungarian New Weird through the short stories of I. Alfonz Fekete and Attila Veres. Hungarian New Weird fiction is a relatively young and niche category in Hungarian literature, emerging from a no-man’s land where literary and speculative fiction intersect. It stems from the underground “Lovecraftian” fanzine The Black Aether, to which both authors contributed. Their narrative approaches differ, but their imaginative material overlaps. Their language destabilises reality and ushers in the unnameable horror, the grotesque, and the dreamlike. This plays a pivotal part as their man-made landscapes showcase and encapsulate liminality in the rural and urban spaces of Hungary. Their stories inhabit liminal spaces at the edge of society, ranging from vast apartment blocks to the Atlantic shores of Morocco, where characters encounter inexplicable manifestations of the weird. In these stories, nature no longer functions as a passive background, but as an active and often incomprehensible force that dissolves distinctions between human and nonhuman worlds. The talk is twofold: the first part introduces Hungarian New Weird fiction, its origins, stylistic tendencies, and selected stories by Fekete and Veres through the lens of vegetation, ecology, and liminal landscapes; the second part opens into a conversation with the authors and the audience.