Beauty Talk & Monsters

Masha Tupitsyn’s Beauty Talk & Monsters is a debut collection of stories as 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.

About the Author

Masha Tupitsyn was born in New York City. In 2004, Masha Tupitsyn worked as an assistant literary editor at BOMB Magazine. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, and most recently, her forthcoming story, "Houses (Or The Uncanny Glows in The Dark)" was a 2005 finalist for the Panliterary Award for Fiction, sponsored by Drunken Boat Magazine. Her fiction and film criticism has been published or is forthcoming in Five Fingers Review, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Me Three, Monkey Bicycle, and Nth Position.