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Beauty Talk & Monsters

by Masha Tupitsyn (Goodreads Author)

4.43 · rating details · 30 ratings · 9 reviews

Masha Tupitsyn's Beauty Talk & Monsters is a debut collection ofstories as told through the movies. Equally influenced by Brian De Palma and KathyAcker, Tupitsyn revisits the ruins of a childhood and youth nurtured on the fringeof the glittering lower Manhattan art world and the Atlantic haven of Provincetownin the 1980s. Moving fluidly through space, time, and a range of

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Paperback, 237 pages

Published May 25th 2007 by Semiotext(e)

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Dec 12, 2007

Pamster rated it

"Maybe horror films gradually disappeared because horror no longer needs a separate category, thought Carrie. Nicole Kidman made Carrie just as tense when she thought about all the blood Nicole had lost to look the way she looked in The Stepford Wives, compared to the way she looked in Days of Thunder. A feral garden, now a sewing kit."

I loved these stories drenched in film obsession. She is pissed about things that I am pissed about, which is one of my favorite qualities i...more

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Jun 20, 2009

Pax Analog rated it

Brilliant blade-work prose weaving interpersonal recall and imagination with pungent cinematic references.

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May 05, 2008

Emmanuel rated it

Evocative to the max. I had the pleasure of editing her reading for KQED, but, unfortunately, never got to meet her. My fiction professor saw me reading this book and said she had met Masha in New York so I asked, "What is she like?" and all she said was "She's beautiful" and I laughed 'cause a. I never asked what she looked like and b. Masha would have a field day with that response. I didn't have to ask my professor if she had read the book to know that she hadn't, but I as...more

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Jan 04, 2008

Juha rated it

I've never encountered a book like this. A story unfolds through the eyes of a girl, only her eyes are always on the silver screen. Somehow the result manages to weave fiction and film review together seamlessly... it becomes part story, part consolidated "classic films" critique; and what's most interesting to me is the way that the latter only brings out the emotional aspect of the book - the character's brave longing - rather than veers away from it. Lovely.

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Dec 02, 2007

Ken rated it

Recommends it for: everyone

Masha Tupitsyn gets behind the veil and puts words to what we have been unable to articulate about our strange, intimate relationship to the movies. It is a moving collection, at once poignant and calming, the pleasure of a sad song. It is also incredibly intelligent, leaving one thinking about reality in a profoundly different way.

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Aug 23, 2008

Mattilda added it

Here's my review on Bookslut:

http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2007_10_...

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Jan 28, 2008

vani rated it

Recommends it for: you.

i did not want this book to end.

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Dec 17, 2009

Nikki marked it as to-read

short stories to read hear and there.

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Oct 26, 2008

David added it

I gave up on this one.

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Jan 01, 2012

Mike marked it as to-read

Shelves: film

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About Masha Tupitsyn

http://twitter.com/lifeasweshowit
http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=872...
http://www.semiotexte.com/documentPage/P...
http://www.kqed.org/arts/writersblock/ep...

Masha Tupitsyn is the author of LACONIA: 1,200 TWEETS ON FILM (ZerO Books, 2011), Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007) and co-editor of the anthology Life As We S...morehttp://twitter.com/lifeasweshowit
http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=872...
http://www.semiotexte.com/documentPage/P...
http://www.kqed.org/arts/writersblock/ep...

Masha Tupitsyn is the author of LACONIA: 1,200 TWEETS ON FILM (ZerO Books, 2011), Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007) and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009), which was voted one of the best film books of 2009 by Dennis Cooper, January Magazine, Shelf Awareness, and Chicago’s New City. She is currently working on a collection of film essays called Screen to Screen. Her fiction and criticism has appeared in the anthologies Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century (2008) and the Encyclopedia Project Volume II, F-K (2010) and Puerto del Sol, 2nd Floor Projects, Vertebrae Journal, TINA, Venus Magazine, The Rumpus, Animal Shelter, Fanzine, Make/Shift, NYFA Current, Bookforum, Fence, Five Fingers Review, and San Francisco’s KQED’s The Writer’s Block. She regularly contributes video essays on film and culture to Ryeberg Curated Video.

Some reviews of Beauty Talk & Monsters:

"In Beauty Talk & Monsters, Tupitsyn tosses her never-quite-named (but seemingly consistent) female narrator between ages, cities and especially men in this lovely, unconventional debut, but gives her an unalloyed solace in the form of cinema...The narrator's salvation and distraction are consistently found in film: she sees one lover through the prism of Mean Streets; wonders if her neediness equates her to the shark in Jaws; and riffs on the macho pull of Jack Nicholson or potential insecurities of Tom Cruise. She's also fascinated with the idea of beauty and societal perceptions of women, famous and not, and shares her thoughts on cultural touchstones like Nicole Kidman's aesthetic trajectory (once "a feral garden, now a sewing kit"). Other pieces here deftly blend real and imagined Hollywood, film theory and thematic narrative, as in "Kleptomania," where the narrator looks on as Judy Garland, Diane Keaton and Tippi Hedren's s Hitchcock character, "Marnie," compare notes on their lives in a bar. The more experimental pieces will be buttery popcorn for silver-screen junkies, but the more traditional, detail-rich stories (like "The Ghost of Berlin") make a narrator who's waiting for "someone or something to stick" memorable."--Publisher's Weekly

"The experience of reading Beauty Talk & Monsters is humid, intimate, and juicy; like spying through a window at a neighbor's television set, it provides both the voyeuristic pleasure of watching a stranger's activity and the familiar flicker of a well-known film, now playing in a stranger's psyche."
-- Michelle Tea, San Francisco Bay Chronicle

“Masha Tupitsyn, whose brilliant Beauty Talk & Monsters collapses and flits between memoir, film criticism, and fiction, looks at gender construction and desire as filtered through the movies in a way that is different from the way most feminist and queer theorists are reading heteronormativity in pop culture right now. It's almost like, where lots of feminist and queer writers are focused on trying to undo binary gender, Tupitsyn is staring obsessively at it, trying to read how it works.”
–-Jessica Hoffman, Editor/publisher of Make/Shift Magazine

"Masha Tupitsyn's debut collection is a breathtaking mixture of tall tale and autobiography, film theory and lover's lament, traveler's diary and gender treatise. A novel-in-parts disguised as a bootleg memoir crossed with a Hollywood tell-all, Beauty Talk & Monsters dares us to ask if there is a point to reliability when a shifty narrator can provide so much obsessive insight.... Beauty Talk & Monsters has a shimmering intimacy." --Bitch Magazine

"Masha Tupitsyn's debut collection is a breathtaking(less)

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