Dead Girls, Alice Bolin
Dead Girls, Alice Bolin
1 Rating(s)
List: $23.99 | Sale: $16.79
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Dead Girls
Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

Author: Alice Bolin

Narrator: Em Eldridge

Unabridged: 8 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 06/26/2018


Synopsis

“Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence... I love this book. I want to take it into the middle of a crowded room and hold it up and scream until someone tackles me the ground; even then, I’d probably keep screaming.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties""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 MeNamed a most anticipated book of 2018 by Bitch MagazineIn 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.Reminiscent of the piercing insight of Rebecca Solnit and the critical skill of Hilton Als, Bolin constructs a sharp, perceptive, and revelatory dialogue on the portrayal of women in media and their roles in our culture.

About Alice Bolin

Alice Bolin is the author of Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, a New York Times Notable Book. She has been nominated for Anthony and Edgar awards. Her nonfiction appears in the New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, the LA Review of Books, and the Paris Review Daily. She lives in Minneapolis.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jessica

I received this book for free as part of an Instagram tour (TLC Book Tours specifically) I did to promote the book. Despite the title, this isn’t really a book about dead girls. It’s more a book about girls in pop culture, but also a book about the author’s experiences in LA. However, even that doesn......more

Goodreads review by Autumn

Even though this book didn’t examine the dead girl trope as much as I wanted it to, it’s still an incredible examination of the forces that create an environment that allows the dead girl trope to thrive. She also looks at the ways white women and white feminism are both trapped by, perpetuators, an......more