Capsule 1: Hotel

Our debut capsule centered around the theme ‘hotel’. Together with the book club, we explored that unstable space between the private and public through flirtatious encounters, missed opportunities, bittersweet reunions, whispered confessions, dimly lit hallways, schemes and secret negotiations, passionate rendezvous, violent confrontations, locked doors, missing room keys, and grand staircases. Through literature, we encountered hotels, motels and inns as sites of alienation, instability, displacement, and the violence of marginalization. We read:

Hotel du Lac (1984), Anita Brookner

Hotel Iris (1996), Yōko Ogawa

Madonna in a Fur Coat (1943), Sabahattin Ali

Salt Houses (2017), Hala Alyan