Category: l’Hôtel Dauphin

HFR got stuck. We’ve been called back to “l’Hôtel Dauphin,” booked an extended stay at the hotel from Haruki Murakami’s novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance. Room service can be reached by dialing )))0(((. Staying here are new guests with stories we haven’t read, all of us searching this section of Sapporo for the sheep with a star on its back. Send us capital W weird shit. Critical essays about Murakami’s work, liminality, travel, labyrinths, astral projection; stories that feature the Sheep Man, the Dolphin Hotel, let’s explore the dissociative spaces that fuel nightmares, fugue statues, and dreams.

Book Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Paul Éluard & Max Ernst’s Surrealist Collaboration Repetitions & Misadventures of Immortals

“Max and I were at Verdun together and used to shoot at each other.” This was how French poet Paul Éluard drolly described his first encounter with the German artist Max Ernst. Each had served in his country’s army during the First World War and had fought on opposite sides during the battle of Verdun.…
Fictional Dispatch from l’Hôtel Dauphin by Emily Rems: “Apartment”

At first glance, they looked just like babies. Frozen, lifeless newborns still curled up as if they had never left the warm insides of their mothers. But once I got a little closer, I saw what they really were—suckling pigs. I couldn’t believe my luck. When I’d first told my boyfriend about the job interview…
New Fiction from l’Hôtel Dauphin: “The Silovik’s Corpse” by Theo Yurevitch

The stain is in the middle of the bed, but the silovik’s wife never sleeps in the middle of the bed. She sleeps on the left side even when she is alone, which is much of the time. Polina is sure of that. The linens are her responsibility. Now all that is left on the…
Fiction Review: Adam Stutz Reads Arqueles Vela’s Posthumous Collection Señorita Etcetera

“The door of the Café opens onto the most populous avenue, riotous with sun. Nevertheless, upon crossing this threshold hanging as if from the last rung of reality, one seems to enter the subway of dreams, ideations.” So begins this terrific translation by Julianna Neuhouser of Arqueles Vela’s formative work, Señorita Etcetera. This dual language…
“Evil Was Real”: Matthew Kinlin & Nicholas Rombes Discuss His Novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

Released just over a decade ago, the mystery of The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing from Nicholas Rombes only deepens. In the mid 90s, a journalist tracks down and interviews a rare film librarian who once burned a stockpile of film cannisters and disappeared for many years. The head-twisting neo-noir follows Laing’s descriptions of these…
New Haunted Passages Short Story by David Leo Rice: “The Ward Clerk”

One: Philadelphia, 1965 Only the Ward Clerk, Gladys van Pelt, knew the full nature of the syndrome that tore through and perhaps, in some underlying sense, generated my family, and she shared her findings with no one except those who received me in the end, when it was far too late for that knowledge to…
Fiction Review: Jacob Stovall Reads Rebecca Fishow’s Collection How to Love a Black Hole

Something is always wrong with our bodies, at least a little. Sometimes you have an ear growing out of your back. Sometimes your upper skull is removed and fastened over your face. Rebecca Fishow, author of How to Love a Black Hole, is closely attuned to these strange mutations. The collection of fabulist flash fiction…
Sneak Preview: “Prologue: Eternal Weimar” from David Leo Rice’s New Novel The Berlin Wall

Europe, 2020. Some claim that the Berlin Wall, once a living entity, is coming back together, its scattered pieces seeking reunion on the far side of history. The European continent trembles on the edge of total war, either in reality or deep in its own feverish imagination. Part present-tense apocalyptic satire and part neo-medieval phantasmagoria,…
Restored Fiction: “Slow 9/11” by Dolan Morgan

“Can you describe a time when someone betrayed you?” This question is posed to me by Jan during a round of the Ungame, which I play over lunch with a group of colleagues in our architecture firm on the 92nd floor. The Ungame looks deceptively like Candy Land but is described, in its product materials,…