The Letters of Mina Harker by Dodie Bellamy

The Letters of Mina Harker by Dodie Bellamy

Bellamy's debut novel revives the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s.

Hypocrisy's not the problem, I think, it's allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into--how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she's physical and I'm "only psychic." ... The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregroy Corso ...
--Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker

First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate the central female 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. Stylish but ruthlessly unpretentious, The Letters of Mina Harker was Bellamy's first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.

Bellamy, Dodie: - Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor, known for her non-traditional use of sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation. Her work is frequently associated with that of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles. She is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Her Ugly Duckling chapbook BARF MANIFESTO was named best book of 2009 under 30 pages by Time Out New York. Other books include the buddhist, ACADEMONIA, Pink Steam, THE LETTERS OF MINA HARKER, and CUNT-UPS, which won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. Recent projects include CUNT NORTON (Les Figues, 2013), in which she takes the second edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry and sexualizes it in the language of porn and desire; NEW NARRATIVE: 1975-1995, a Nightboat Books anthology she's editing with Kevin Killian; and When the Sick Rule the World, her third collection of essays, forthcoming from Semiotext(e). Her reflections on the Occupy Oakland movement, The Beating of Our Hearts, was published as a chapbook in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and THE TV SUTRAS was released by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2014.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781635901597
ISBN 10	1635901596
Title	The Letters of Mina Harker
Author	Dodie Bellamy
Series	Semiotext Native Agents
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Semiotext (E)
Year published	2021-10-19
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.