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.

“Risking Chaos”: Marcus Pactor Chats with David Leo Rice, Author of The New House

David Leo Rice writes singularly weird fiction about the experiences of artists and drifters wandering hallucinatory landscapes. His latest novel, The New House, is a kunstlerroman focused on a child named Jakob, who trains to be an artist in a town of sentient dolls, blood clots who are sisters and lovers and advisors, and men…
“Capturing the Is-ness of Liminal Events”: Avinash Rajendran’s Dual Review of Rites and Thin Places

“What are these dark days I see in this world so badly bent … How much longer can it last? How long can it go on?” Dylan asks prophetically in his 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, a question that has endured in our collective imagination for two years now. The Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci…
David Leo Rice’s New Novel The New House, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

My wife and I still talk often about the term “art monster”—first coined in Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, and introduced to us via Claire Dederer’s 2017 Paris Review article “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” (we don’t exactly have our fingers on the pulse, my wife and I).…
Begat Who Begat Who Begat, short stories by Marcus Pactor, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

Marcus Pactor’s sophomore short story collection, Begat Who Begat Who Begat, explores the deceptively complex topics of mundanity and domesticity through experimentation in both rhizomatic storytelling and narrative form. Over the course of the collection’s 122 pages, Pactor presents 17 stories situated just left of reality. Across varying subjects, such as a toilet that transmutes…
Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don’t Make a Sound, a novel by Mike Kleine & Dan Hoy, reviewed by Jace Brittain

It begins with a body. Like a lot of the books and movies of the detective noir genre, we know there is a woman’s body and not much else: Michael says, I hate that she’s dead. Daniel says, I know. Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds…
Henry’s Chapel, a novel by Graham Guest, reviewed by Christopher Lura

If we are to take Graham Guest’s new book Henry’s Chapel as a novel—and it is a novel, let’s be clear—it might be described like this: it is a story of a group of people—of a family, for lack of a better word—living off the grid somewhere in the backwoods of East Texas. There are children—Henry, an…
One More Number, six surreal stories by Craig Rodgers, reviewed by Alan ten-Hoeve

I first read Craig Rodgers’ stuff last spring when Death of Print resurrected his 2019 novel, The Ghost of Mile 43, from the ashes of Soft Cartel. The hopelessness and misanthropy of that book acted like a counter pressure to the pandemic malaise that had me wanting to sleep the rest of my days away.…
ANGEL HOUSE, a novel by David Leo Rice, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

ANGEL HOUSE is the kind of novel that will mean something different to everyone who reads it, and indeed, will likely mean something different to me if I read it again in a few years, and yet again if I read it a third time somewhere down the line (all distinct possibilities). Because of this, I’ll go ahead…
“To What End?”: Lorenzo Bartolucci on A Room in Dodge City, Vol. 2: The Blut Branson Era, a novel-in-vignettes by David Leo Rice

Why do you want to be a writer? It came up casually, over dinner, but I’ll never forget the way David Leo Rice paused (rather uncharacteristically) to consider a question he didn’t seem to have bothered with overmuch on his own—which may be the simplest definition of a vocation, after all. And I’ll never forget…