Flick Chick  Masha Tupitsyn's stories lose it to the movies
Some people grow up loving movies so much they become
filmmakers. Others become film critics. Masha Tupitsyn has taken
a less traveled route by channeling her cinephilia into a short
story collection. Beauty Talk & Monsters features 19 stories
devoted to movie love at its most hallucinatory. This intensely
personal book blurs the line between screen and self to an
extreme degree, allowing cinematic free association to take
precedence over plot and coherence. The overall effect can be
alienating but not entirely unpleasant, suggesting a late night
spent surfing IMDb in a haze of pot and romantic yearning.
Navigating the book's web of cinematic references demands a
fluency in contemporary movie culture. (Tupitsyn devotes ample
space to Mean Streets, Jaws, Dirty Dancing, and other
touchstones from her youth.) Beauty Talk also requires tolerance
for the kind of impenetrable prose style that often gives
experimental fiction a bad name. "Whenever I watch