Alice Bolin

writing

✳

  • Culture Creep

    Out June 3, 2025 from Mariner/HarperCollins.

    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

    preorder here

    Advanced praise for Culture Creep

    “Admirers of razor-sharp, social science-backed cultural criticism will fly through this utter treat of a collection. Bolin’s shrewd skewerings of late-stage capitalism, the fanaticism surrounding brand founders, and other pop culture obsessions are not only prescient and illuminating but a true pleasure to read.” — Amanda Montell, New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Magical Overthinking and Cultish

    “In Culture Creep, Alice Bolin traces the rot back to its sources, looking at the ways Millennials have been indoctrinated through our cultural consumption, and more worryingly, what exactly we’ve been indoctrinated into. I can think of no higher compliment than to state that this book re-framed my entire adolescence. I highly recommend you read it.” — Ling Ma, author of Severance and Bliss Montage

    “It feels impossible that anything could top Alice Bolin’s staggeringly brilliant 2018 collection, Dead Girls, but—naturally—she’s back to top herself. Culture Creep is an unforgettable, gut-churning ride into the hell of Millennial girlhood, from its nightmarish roots to its disquieting future. This book will not comfort you. But it will make everything clear.” — Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties

  • Dead Girls

    A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018

    An Edgar Award nominee for best critical / biographical

    Best of 2018 according to Kirkus, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Portland Mercury, Bustle, Thrillist, and Electric Lit

    In 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.

    order here

    Praise for Dead Girls

    “Stylish and inspired.” — New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice

    “[A] deliciously dry, moody essay collection… Bolin’s book is a lyrical meditation.” — Carina Chocano, New York Times Book Review

    “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

    “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

    “[A] sharp-eyed book of essays… In her willingness to show herself as a work in progress, thinking through a problem rather than presenting its solution, [Bolin] leaves breathing room for indecision and revision, ensuring that her writing is always pulsing with life.”  — Washington Post

Photo credit: Bria Fast

Alice Bolin

is the author of the essay collections Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession and Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse. 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 Cut. She lives in Minneapolis

You can reach her at alice {at} alicebolin {dot} com.