A collection of stories told through the movies that revisits the
lower Manhattan art world and the Atlantic haven of Provincetown in the
1980s.
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.