Skip to content
MIT Press
  • MIT Press
  • Books
    • Column
      • View all subjects
      • New releases
      • Catalogs
      • Textbooks
      • Series
      • Awards
    • Column
      • Authors
      • Distributed presses
      • The MIT Press Reader
      • Podcasts
      • Collections
    • Column
      • MIT Press Direct

        MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.

        • Learn more
  • Journals
    • column
      • Journals all topics
      • Economics
      • International Affairs, History, & Political Science
    • column
      • Arts & Humanities
      • Science & Technology
      • Open access
    • column
      • MIT Press journals

        MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.

        • Learn more
  • Open Access
    • column
      • Open access at the MIT Press
      • Open access books
      • Open access journals
    • column
      • Direct to Open
      • MIT Open Publishing Services
      • MIT Press Open on PubPub
    • Column
      • Open access

        The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.

        • Learn more
  • Info for
    • column
      • Current authors
      • Prospective authors
      • Instructors
    • column
      • Media inquiries
      • Booksellers
      • Rights and permissions
    • column
      • Resources

        Collaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. If you can’t find the resource you need here, visit our contact page to get in touch.

        • Learn more
  • Give
  • About
    • Column
      • About
      • Jobs
      • Internships
      • MIT Press Editorial Board
      • MIT Press Management Board
      • Our MIT story
    • Column
      • Catalogs
      • News
      • Events
      • Conferences
      • Bookstore
    • Column
      • The MIT Press

        Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

        • Learn more
  • Contact Us
Newsletter
MIT Press
Newsletter

Books

    Authors

      On the site

        • Home
        • Semiotext(e) / Native Agents
        • fiction
        • Beauty Talk & Monsters
        Beauty Talk & Monsters

        Semiotext(e) / Native Agents

        Beauty Talk & Monsters

        by Masha Tupitsyn

        • $14.95 Paperback

        240 pp., 6 x 9 in,

        • Paperback
        • 9781584350446
        • Published: April 6, 2007
        • Publisher: Semiotext(e)

        $14.95

        • MIT Press Bookstore
        • Penguin Random House
        • Amazon
        • Barnes and Noble
        • Bookshop.org
        • Indiebound
        • Indigo
        • Books a Million

        Other Retailers:

        • MIT Press Bookstore
        • Penguin Random House
        • Amazon
        • Barnes and Noble
        • Bookshop.org
        • Indiebound
        • Indigo
        • Books a Million
        • Amazon.co.uk
        • Blackwells
        • Bookshop.org
        • Foyles
        • Hive
        • Waterstones
        • Request permissions
        • Description
        • Author(s)
        • Praise

        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.

        Masha Tupitsyn, a writer, critic, and multimedia artist, teaches film and literature at the New School. She is the author of Like Someone in Love: An Addendum to Love Dog, Love Dog, LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, and Beauty Talk & Monsters (Semiotext(e)e), and coeditor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film. Her 24-hour film Love Sounds is an audio-essay and history of love in English-speaking cinema. Her ongoing essay film DECADES is a history of cinematic sound and scores organized by decade.

        Here is a festival of meaning! Masha Tupitsyn does not meditate on the moviesshe 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, author of Jack the Modernist and Denny Smith

        Beauty Talk is in part a meditation on the symbiotic pleasures and impositions of intellectual exileat once an indictment and a celebrationa poetic expression of voluntary solitude which questions what it means to hole up inside yourself, to resist the roles you've been assigned and the thoughts you"re conditioned to accept as your own, and to willfully separate from the disappointment of other people without losing your engagement in and appraisal of the world around you.... The one thin line Tupitsyn maintains is that between on-screen and off-screen. Pop culture is subject, theme, character, and plot in her work, which takes American media as a narrative foundation.

        Brian Pera

        Fanzine

        In her debut collection, Masha Tupitsyn is at her best when recalling emotional disaster, and when she aligns herself to this end, with strategies of Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus.

        Jeanine Herman

        BOMB

        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.

        Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

        Bookslut

        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

        This stunning book is a reckoning with what it is to have been raised with the movies, to not be able to tell the difference anymore between what we've fantasized or dreamt of, what we've been frightened of, what may have been our own or no one's life.

        Rebecca Brown, author of The End of Youth and The Haunted House

        Related Books

        The Cheerful Scapegoat
        Of Kings and Things
        Another Morocco
        The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories
        If You’re A Girl
        The Madame Realism Complex
        Inside & Out of Byzantium
        logo
        • Column 1
          • Books
          • Journals
          • The MIT Press Reader
          • Podcasts
          • Imprints
        • Column 2
          • The MIT Press
            • About
            • Bookstore
            • Catalogs
            • Conferences
            • Press Editorial Board
            • Jobs
            • Internships
            • Press Management Board
            • News
            • Staff
            • Code of Conduct
            • Give
        • Column 3
          • Site Help
            • Accessibility
            • FAQ
            • Our eBooks
            • Privacy Policy
            • Terms of Use
        • Column 4
          • Resources
            • Current Authors
            • Prospective Authors
            • Booksellers
            • Instructors
            • Rights and Permissions
            • Media Inquiries
            • MIT Discounts
        • Column 5
          • Digital
            • CogNet
            • Digital Partners and Products
            • Knowledge Futures Group
            • MIT Press Direct
        • Global

          One Broadway 12th Floor Cambridge, MA 02142

        • Contact

        Connect

        © 2023 MIT Press. All Rights Reserved.

        Powered by Supadu