Ten years in the making, The Letters Of Mina Harker is an epistolary novel which brings the hero of Bram Stoker's fin de siecle masterpiece Dracula forward into the acronymic age of MTV, HIV, ATM, VCR. Like Dracula, the Mina Harker Letters trace a woman's romantic involvement with four very different men, as well as her affair with a culture that threatens simultaneously to destroy and invigorate her.

Critical praise for Dodie Bellamy and The Letters Of Mina Harker

"Hallucinations was (is) wonderful work. That triple edge between the fan's literal retelling ("and then…and then…";), the critic's judgment and the poet's reading/refiguring (poet-as-sequel-writer?) allows for what feels like an honest engagement with the movies—you notice your distancing/ironizing moves as they're happening, rather than simply making them the precondition of the writing, so the irony doesn't come off as opposed to the pleasure of what's on screen, or as the cynicism of most "academic" writing about popular forms. Good stuff."

"What is important to Bellamy is that writers are always trying, more than to represent sex, to represent "physical sensation," and this task is an impossible but inescapable one. What is important to me about Bellamy's argument…is that postfeminism allows us to think about ourselves as women beyond sexual attitudes, beyond the prehistoric days of women as victims, and to acknowledge and embrace the heterogeneity of the female population. Having a vagina doesn't have to determine how one thinks or acts."

"A thinking, a sexy and fabulous world embedded in a letter. Bellamy's writing sparks and whines, glides, pulls you up short, engages in bouts of the limbo beneath inhumanely low bars."

"The prose is so high it's thrilling… Dodie's work so enlarges my life I could describe it endlessly because I would be talking about myself. I look forward to the publication of The Letters of Mina Harker so our fin de siecle can have its own Les Chants de Maldoror."

"With the desire to embody a lover comes a straining to embody sex acts in language acts. Sexual and compositional energy are linked again and again. Genital excretions become language… The brute rhythmic force of the prose radiates this doomed effort to join these realms of action. Constant climax. Mind-fuck virtuoso fantasy."

The intriguing story of Dodie Bellamy

Born in the Calumet region of Indiana, raised on the romance of Al Capone and Johhny Stompanato, Dodie Bellamy now lives in the warehouse district of San Francisco, CA, where she and her partner, writer Kevin Killian, founded and publish the cutting-edge art-literary zine Mirage/Period[ical]. She has published books of fiction and short-stories, and her work has been widely published in literary journals and magazines as well as anthologized. She is the director of Small Press Traffic, a Bay area non-profit literary foundation, a sometime teacher and journalist, a die-hard horror movie fan, a vegetarian and a reader of feminist theory. She is at work on a new novel, The Fourth Form, and a collection of essays.

Other publications

Novel:
Real, Talisman House, 1994, (written with the late Sam D'Allesandro) impressed audiences with its picture of San Francisco writers and artists coping with the spectre of AIDS.

Poetry:
Hallucinations, Meow, 1997
Broken English, Meow, 1996
Answer, Leave Books, 1993
Feminine Hijinx, Hanuman, 1990

Anthologies:
Primary Trouble, Talisman House, 1996; The New Fuck You, Semiotexte, 1995; A Poetics Of Criticism, Leave Books, 1994; The Art Of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets, Poets and Poets Press, 1994; and High Risk, Plume, 1991; as well as Moving Borders: Three Decades Of Innovative Writing By Women, to be published by Talisman House in 1998.