Dodie Bellamy Boeken

Exploring themes of disenfranchisement and vulgarity, this collection of essays delves into American working-class life and aesthetic values. Dodie Bellamy reflects on the complexities of information overload and the struggle between expansion and restraint in research. Drawing parallels to Colette's aging courtesan, she navigates the challenges of living between two increasingly distant centuries, revealing a deep sense of embarrassment and introspection throughout her writing.

A writer takes on subjects as varied as vomit, Kathy Acker's wardrobe, and Occupy Oakland, in lyric explorations of illness, health, and the body.

"First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate this minor character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and reimagine her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s--a woman not unlike Dodie Bellamy. Harker confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four different men in a series of letters. Vampirizing Mina Harker, Bellamy turns the novel into a laboratory: a series of attempted transmutations between the two women in which the real story occurs in the gaps and the slippages. Lampooning the intellectual theory-speak of that era, Bellamy's narrator fights to inhabit her own sexuality despite feelings of vulnerability and destruction."--Page 4 of cover