Hostage of Stupidity
A mirror held up to an age in which noise replaces thought, slogans replace responsibility, and beautifully packaged nonsense begins to look like common sense.
Discover the bookFiction · Essays · Quiet satire
Alex Buday
The world has never suffered from a shortage of explanations. Only, occasionally, from an excess of confidence in them.
Stories about memory, history and the private cost of public events—alongside essays for a world that keeps confusing slogans with truth.
Writing without illusions.Discover the work
About the writer
Behind the words,
a certain way of looking.
Some stories begin with history. Others with a headline, a border, or the peculiar confidence of someone who has not yet realised they are mistaken. The interesting part is usually what they have in common.
Alex Buday is a Central European writer of fiction, essays and literary satire. His work explores memory, history and the private cost of public events—along with the illusions people build to make power, progress and everyday absurdity feel reassuringly normal.
His fiction is shaped by borders, silence and the unfinished histories of Central Europe. His essays move through politics, culture, technology and human nature with a quiet irony and a persistent suspicion of easy answers.
He is the founder and editor of Illusions Not Included (INI), an independent multilingual literary publication. Across books, stories and shorter reflections, the same question keeps returning: what remains when the official explanation has finished speaking?
Selected writing
Things we tell
ourselves.
Stories, essays and satire about the assumptions we rarely notice until they begin running the world.
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Browse all writing on INI Literary satire
The Sparrow
When the Ordinary Lost Its Audience
Human nature
The Owl
When Looking Serious Was All It Took to Seem Wise
Money, work & the economy
Free Money Knows No Social Class…
Abbie Hoffman, Wall Street, and the strange pull of free money
Human nature
The Rat
When Adaptability Got Bad Press
An independent literary space
Illusions
Not Included.
Essays, satire, stories and a few inconvenient observations about the world we have grown accustomed to calling normal.
Intelligent satire, personal observation, and a healthy suspicion of anything that describes itself as inevitable.
Visit INI Published in English and HungarianBooks & stories
History,
remembered personally.
Fiction, essays and satire shaped by Central Europe, private memory and the fragile illusions of freedom.
1984: A Summer on the Other Side of the Wall
A lyrical story of borders, silence and memory, set in the final years of the Cold War—and in the uneasy space between one life and the next.
Discover the e-bookThe Central European stories
Chernobyl · National Mourning · The Wall · Velvet · The Border
View the author page on Amazon