From 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.
"[A] deliciously dry, moody essay collection… Bolin's book is a lyrical meditation." - Carina Chocano, New York Times Book Review, on Dead Girls
"Excellent... an uncompromising and infinitely engaging exploration of the existential burdens of being a woman or a girl living, and dying, in our misogynist culture… Bolin's essays dismantle our romantic, toxic notions about female sexuality and innocence, and interrogate her own role in consuming them, in order to solve the ongoing, unsolved mysteries of how real girls and women can outlive America's obsession with their ruin." - Salon.com on Dead Girls
"Sharp-eyed… [Bolin] stakes her ground with a refreshing air of defiance, freely mixing highbrow and lowbrow, late-night cable television with classics of American literature. In her willingness to show herself as a work in progress, thinking through a problem rather than presenting its solution, she leaves breathing room for indecision and revision, ensuring that her writing is always pulsing with life." - Washington Post on Dead Girls
"Bracing and blazingly smart, Alice Bolin's Dead Girls could hardly be more needed or more timely. A critical contribution to the cultural discussion of gender and genre, Los Angeles and noir, the unbearable persistence of the male gaze and the furtive potency of female rage." - Megan Abbott, Edgar Award–winning author of You Will Know Me
"The essay collection takes a good hard look at this fascination with dead girls… 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
"Stylish and inspired." - New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice, on Dead Girls
"Dead Girls turns experience into literature… Amid the atomized sprawl of American cities and American culture, Bolin lays bare the connections lurking beneath the glare and the violence, daring us to accept nothing as it is." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"I love Dead Girls! Bolin's essays are the perfect blend of criticism, humor, and memoir. The book made me think about my own fascination with true crime in a way I have never considered before. This is a book for any mystery/true crime fanatic... or even a casual fan." - Emma Roberts, Belletrist
"Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay coll
