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

The Letters of Mina Harker

by Dodie Bellamy

Introduction by Emily Gould

$17.95 Paperback
eBook

272 pp., 6 x 9 in,

Paperback
9781635901597
Published: October 19, 2021
Publisher: Semiotext(e)

$17.95

eBook
9781635901603
Published: October 19, 2021
Publisher: Semiotext(e)

$17.99

MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo
Books a Million

Other Retailers:

MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo
Books a Million
Amazon.co.uk
Blackwells
Bookshop.org
Foyles
Hive
Waterstones

Request permissions

Description
Author(s)
Praise

Bellamy's debut novel revives a minor 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.

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).

I am … in awe of Dodie Bellamy's talent … grateful for the profound ways in which this novel has caused me to consider what the novel form is and can be when subjected to the most brilliant and original talent imaginable. The Letters of Mina Harker has continually unfolded in my imagination and increased my astonishment … its power and beauty have remained utterly mysterious.
Dennis Cooper

A luscious deeply fucked up extravagant work.
Eileen Myles

The Letters of Mina Harker unfurls like a red velvet carpet wilkomming you to a house of horrors.
Traci Vogel, SF Bay Guardian

Books

Authors

On the site

The Letters of Mina Harker

The Letters of Mina Harker

Related Books