In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS. Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.

The Letters of Mina Harker (Library of American Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Bellamy, Dodie

Genre Fiction

University of Wisconsin Press

Poetry. Prose. "CUNT-UPS is an explosion of textual sexuality that resists principles of formal ordering, is polyvalent in its voice and range, and as perverse in its sentence construction as its content. Its 'setting' is the mediated exchange itself, the fractured articulation of 'a female body who has sex writing about sex.' While the title might imply a gendered site of production, it also suggests a sexual/textual violence that is more than a mere 'disorganization of the senses' but a dismemberment of the gendered body as well. The text becomes a (feminist) desiring machine, its writing a prosthetic device mediating the traces of physicality, imagination, abjection, and pleasure. "Throw on the switch, plug into the mediating machine, the flesh-object writes back, becomes subject, suspect, the gaze cut-up and fed back into vibrating loops of unobtainable desire."—David Buuck

Cunt-Ups

Poetry

Tender Buttons Books

17th Anniversary Edition of Dodie Bellamy's award-winning classic, Cunt-Ups. With an introduction by Sophie Robinson.

Cunt-Ups, 17th Anniversary Edition

Tender Buttons Press

Feminine Hijinx (Hanuman Book No. 41)

Hanuman Books

"In this writing, it's like Dodie Bellamy's being questioned by 12 detectives. They are talking over one another so naturally her voice assumes 12 simultaneous registers, each very endearing but still hot. After she recites her collected works the detectives are willing to forgive everything. They only want to sleep with her." - Cedar Sigo  "Bellamy's Fat Chance is pellucid, masterful prose, at once a bodiceful of grainy secrets, a set of falsities, and a treasury of urbane/innocent candor. To her, against eternity, I raise a glass of stingo! There are many reasons I read Bellamy, not least for the rapidity of insight, mediumistic spirit, and her enormous, at times jocular, tenderness." - Lissa Wolsak

Fat Chance

Nomados

Fiction. "PINK STEAM is not kitschy, it is a culturally astute document of the real written by a master at the height of her powers"--Jennifer Moxley. The intimate secrets of Dodie Bellamy's life--sex, shoplifting, voyeurism, and writing are illuminated in Bellamy's incredibly tailored latest work where true confession bleeds into high theory into trash cinema. PINK STEAM barges beyond the cliches of gendered experience; unafraid of the personal, unabashed by politics and sex, Bellamy makes confusion her OK Corral. Dodie Bellamy is the author of CUNT-UPS and FEMININE HIJINX, both available at SPD.

Pink Steam

Romance

Suspect Thoughts Press

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.
A moving meld of essay, memoir, and story, When the Sick Rule the World collects Dodie Bellamy's new and recent lyric prose. Taking on topics as eclectic as vomit, Kathy Acker's wardrobe, and Occupy Oakland, Bellamy here examines illness, health, and the body―both the social body and the individual body―in essays that glitter with wit even at their darkest moments.
In a safe house in Marin County, strangers allergic to the poisons of the world gather for an evening's solace. In Oakland, protesters dance an ecstatic bacchanal over the cancerous body of the city-state they love and hate. In the elegiac memoir, “Phone Home,” Bellamy meditates on her dying mother's last days via the improbable cipher of Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Finally, Bellamy offers a piercing critique of the displacement and blight that have accompanied Twitter's move into her warehouse-district neighborhood, and the pitiless imperialism of tech consciousness. 
A participant in the New Narrative movement and a powerful influence on younger writers, Bellamy views heteronormativity and capitalism as plagues, and celebrates the micro-revolts of those on the outskirts. In its deft blending of forms, When the Sick Rule the World resiliently and defiantly proclaims the “undeath of the author.” In the realm of sickness, Bellamy asserts, subjectivity is not stable. “When the sick rule the world, mortality will be sexy,” Bellamy prophesies. Those defined by society as sick may, in fact, be its saviors.

When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)

Essays & Correspondence

Semiotext[e]

Product Description 
A new collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment.\nSo. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart. 
--Dodie Bellamy, "Hoarding as Ecriture"\nThis new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, 
When The Sick Rule The World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm. 
 About the Author 
Dodie Bellamy's writing focuses on sexuality, politics and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, the essay and poetry. In 2018–19 she was the subject of 
On Our Mind, a yearlong series of public events, commissioned essays and reading group meetings organized by CCA Wattis ICA. With Kevin Killian, she coedited 
Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997. A compendium of essays on Bellamy's work, 
Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind, was published in 2020 by Wattis ICA/Semiotext(e).

Bee Reaved (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

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.\nHypocrisy'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\nFirst 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.

The Letters of Mina Harker (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Fiction. Nonfiction. Real contains letters between Dodie Bellamy (Mina Harker) and Sam D'Allesandro; the transcription of a story that was taped by D'Allesandro before he died in 1988; and a letter by Bellamy that concerns D'Allesandro's death.

REAL: THE LETTERS OF MINA HARKER AND SAM D'ALLESANDRO

D'Allesandro, Sam

Talisman House, Publishers

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