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.

  • Collected Alex, a novella by A.T. Grant, reviewed by Matt Weinkam

    Collected Alex, a novella by A.T. Grant, reviewed by Matt Weinkam

    IIn part one of A.T. Grant’s three-part novella Collected Alex (winner of the 2012 Caketrain Chapbook Competition) a boy named Alex receives a dead body from his parents for his eighth birthday. “My parents held each other and watched as I inspected it. They were so excited,” Alex tells us. “What am I supposed to…

  • No Man’s Land, comics by Blexbolex, reviewed by Robert Loss

    No Man’s Land, comics by Blexbolex, reviewed by Robert Loss

    Because I’m writing this for “here” as opposed to “over there” in the world of comics criticism, I’ll let you in on a secret: no one can agree on what defines a comic. No one. Is it the words/pictures dynamic? Or is it really just pictures-in-sequence, because, come on, what takes up most of the…

  • One, a text by Blake Butler & Vanessa Place. Assembled by Christopher Higgs. Reviewed by Will Kaufman.

    One, a text by Blake Butler & Vanessa Place. Assembled by Christopher Higgs. Reviewed by Will Kaufman.

    One is perhaps most notable for what it is; a unique collaboration between three writers. Blake Butler and Vanessa Place were assigned the tasks, respectively, of writing the exterior landscape and interior landscape of a single character. They were not allowed to collaborate or communicate at all with each other about their projects. Once they…

  • Sky Saw, a new novel by Blake Butler, reviewed by Sheldon Lee Sompton

    Sky Saw, a new novel by Blake Butler, reviewed by Sheldon Lee Sompton

    In Blake Butler’s lyrically imagined new novel, Sky Saw, due out in December from Tyrant Books, you’ll find the his name spelled Blk Btlr on the cover and on each page. Yes. It’s like that. I toyed with the idea of writing this review without vowels. But I was concerned some might have a problem…