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.

“The Reasonable Liminality of Silent Hill 2”: Chris Kelso in Conversation with YouTuber Jacob Geller

As an educator, I can confirm my controversial belief (and with some certainty) that video games are the nascent form of cultural expression in the 21st century. It might be time for us all to emerge from Plato’s cave and accept that some of the traditions we know and love are dead or quietly dying.…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “Squimbop Fever” by David Leo Rice

I drove all night in the truck I’d found parked in front of the house on Cielo Drive, windows open so the last of the names Jim and Joe could flow out, leaving me in a purified state that I chose to call the Brothers Squimbop, though I knew I was alone. I drove through lowlands…
“The Brothers Squimbop in Hollywood”: A Haunted Passages Short Story by David Leo Rice

After their disastrous tour of Europe, which had necessitated nothing less than complete rebirth from the womb of the witch who had claimed to be their mother, the Brothers Squimbop returned to America, disembarking at the edge of a New World that they could already see would never be new again. They quickly abandoned the…
The Trouble with Language, a TRNSFR Books debut fiction collection by Rebecca Fishow, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

Rawness, strangeness, and unpredictability have been nearly universal facets of daily life in 2020, and, in that sense, Rebecca Fishow’s debut collection, The Trouble with Language, couldn’t have come at a better time. Rife with explorations of self-alienation, desire for purpose, disconnects, and detachments, the thirty pieces of prose poetry, flash fiction, and short fiction…
“Gravity and Other Theories”: A Collaborative Interview with authors Andrew Farkas & David Leo Rice

Andrew Farkas is the author of a novel, The Big Red Herring, and two fiction collections, Sunsphere and Self-Titled Debut. He is an Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing at Washburn University and the fiction editor for The Rupture. He lives in Lawrence, KS. David Leo Rice is a writer and animator from Northampton, MA, currently based in NYC. His first novel, A Room in…
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, a new collection of short stories by Julián Herbert, reviewed by Jesi Buell (Graywolf Press)

I first became aware of Mexican author Julián Herbert when Graywolf published Christina MacSweeney’s translation of his novel Tomb Songs in 2018. Having really enjoyed that work, I was excited for the opportunity to review this trio’s most recent project, Herbert’s Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino. And, I have to admit, after spending…
Zach VandeZande Fiction: “Imperative”

It is night and the feeling is coming on again. You know the one. There are rules for dealing with this, a blunt methodology we have devised over time. Stay awake. Don’t stop thinking. Don’t let it wash over you the way it does. Find something to do. The knight Wallace makes his way up…
Short Story: “Rhizome” by Daniel Miller

OneYou exit the long or short corridor and enter a hexagonal room with a door on each wall. A room with paint on each wall, too, and the paint in this room is alloy orange. On each door, a numeral is printed in gold foil—two through nine. In the center of room is a table…
Short Story Prize 2017: “Monument” by Kristen Gleason

Joanna Ruocco on “Monument,” winner of the 2017 Heavy Feather Story Prize: “A room in my apartment has windows all around (a box of glass), and the weird shining black-green of magnolia leaves presses up to the glass (a box in black-green). I read ‘Monument’ in that room and traveled from my own black-green world…