Alice Bolin – författare

“[A] deliciously dry, moody essay collection” about America’s obsession with violence against women is “a lyrical meditation” (Carina Chocano, New York Times Book Review).In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.Bolin chronicles her life in Los Angeles, dissects the Noir, revisits her own coming of age, and analyzes stories of witches and werewolves, both appreciating and challenging the narratives we construct and absorb every day. Dead Girls begins by exploring the trope of dead women in fiction, and ends by interrogating the more complex dilemma of living women – both the persistent injustices they suffer and the oppression that white women help perpetrate.“Bracing and blazingly smart.” —Megan Abbott, Edgar Award–winning author of You Will Know Me“The cultural criticism serves to help us all think a little bit more about what we’re consuming—and who’s being damaged by it.” —Entertainment Weekly“[A] sharp-eyed book of essays.” —Washington Post“Wise and wonderful.” —Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire“Engrossing . . . eerily enthralling, systematically on point, and quite funny . . . An illuminating study on the role women play in the media and in their own lives.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Smart, thorough, and urgent, Bolin’s essays are a force to be reckoned with.” —Booklist

"This book re-framed my entire adolescence. I highly recommend you read it." — LING MAFrom the critically acclaimed author of Dead Girls (“stylish and inspired”—New York Times Book Review), a sharp, engrossing collection of essays that explore the strange career of popular feminism and steady creep of cults and cult-think into our daily lives.In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.In “The Enumerated Woman,” Bolin investigates how digital diet tracking apps have increasingly transformed our relationships to our bodies. Animal Crossing’s soothing retail therapy is analyzed in “Real Time”—a surprisingly powerful portrait of late capitalism. And in the showstopping “Foundering,” Bolin dissects our buy-in and complicity with mythmaking around iconic founders, from the hubristic fall of Silicon Valley titans, to Enron, Hamilton, and the USA.For readers of Trick Mirror and How to Do Nothing, Culture Creep is a swirl of nostalgia and visions of the future, questioning why, in the face of seismic cultural, political, and technological shifts as disruptive as the internet, we cling to the icons and ideals of the past. Written with her signature blend of the personal and sharply analytical, each of these keen-eyed essays ask us to reckon with our own participation in all manner of popular cults of being, and cults of believing.