Masha Tupitsyn's Beauty Talk & Monsters is a debut series of stories as told through the movies.  Equally influenced by Brian De Palma and Kathy Acker, Tupitsyn revisits the ruins of 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 embraces and confronts a lineage of familiar icons, myths, and on and off-screen cinematic excess in order to challenge the silver screen's century of power over our dreams and ideals.  Masha Tupitsyn's exciting new collection walks the line between the critical acumen of Laura Mulvey and the dark awareness of Mary Gaitskill.  Intimate and intellectual, Tupitsyn’s writing reshapes new narrative fiction for the next generation. 

Masha Tupitsyn was born in New York City.  An enfant terrible of the 1980s, her life-story is half Dirty Dancing, half Laurie Anderson’s Home of The Brave.  She grew up in a circle of Russian intellectuals and neo-avant-garde artists. In 1989, she lived in Moscow for a year where she witnessed and kept an in-depth journal of the cultural resurgence of Perestroika. In 2000, she moved abroad again to London for four years where she did an MA in Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Sussex in England. In 2004, she worked at BOMB Magazine as an Assistant Literary Editor. 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. Beauty Talk & Monsters is her first published book.