Beauty Talk & Monsters by Masha Tupitsyn

Published by Semiotext(e), 2007
Perfect bound softcover
237 pages
9x6 inches

Very Good condition.

“Here is a festival of meaning! Masha Tupitsyn does not meditate on the movies—she reactivates them in an uproar of image, desire, and identification. Her stories are acts of discovery, written under the sign of Kathy Acker, ambitious for literature itself, the prose pitched high.”—Robert Glück

Masha Tupitsyn’s Beauty Talk & Monsters is a debut collection of stories told through the movies. Equally influenced by Brian De Palma and Kathy Acker, Tupitsyn revisits the ruins of a childhood and youth nurtured on the fringe of the glittering lower Manhattan art world and the Atlantic haven of Provincetown in the 1980s. Moving fluidly through space, time, and a range of cinematic frameworks, Tupitsyn cuts through the cynical glamour and illusion of Hollywood to a soft, secret heart. Her narrator, a female loner and traveler, is caught in the maelstrom of films and images, where life is experienced through the eye of a camera lens and seen through the light on the screen. In a precise and elegant style, Beauty Talk & Monsters embraces and confronts a lineage of familiar myths and on- and off-screen cinematic excess in order to challenge the silver screen’s century of power over our dreams and ideals. Intimate and intellectual, Tupitsyn’s stories play with the cinema’s most popular icons and images.