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Notes on the Pop Apocalypse
by Alice Bolin
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.
For readers of Trick Mirror and How to Do Nothing, Culture Creep is a swirl of nostalgia and visions of the future, questioning why, in the face of seismic cultural, political, and technological shifts as disruptive as the internet, we cling to the icons and ideals of the past. Written with her signature blend of the personal and sharply analytical, each of these keen-eyed essays ask us to reckon with our own participation in all manner of popular cults of being, and cults of believing.
"Ferociously smart ... Bolin's sharp analysis draws unintuitive connections between a variety of political and cultural targets, offering a caustic take on the vicissitudes of modern life. This solidifies Bolin's status as a vital chronicler of millennial ennui." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"If power comes from clear-eyed, uncompromising knowledge, Bolin's text is a tool for the takedown of more current trends of consumerism, oppression, and the new technology that fuels them. A ferocious defense of a generation of women against the forces that made them." —Kirkus Reviews
"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
This information about Culture Creep was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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