Literature & Evil

Georges Bataille's only TV interview (1958) on his book Literature And Evil.

Beauty Talk + Monsters

Masha Tupitsyn's debut collection of short stories is itself a kind of monster; a hybrid constructed from fiction, personal narrative, film criticism, and feminist theory. Tupitsyn seamlessly melds intellectual thought with poignant private experience as she develops solemn and striking female voices. In her first story Diegesis, (World of Fiction) the narrator's body and the camera become one,

It's attached to me, or in me, or behind me, and I know I'm being

watched, but by whom? I am half seer/half seen.

Throughout the book there is this sense of inside and outside at once and Tupitsyn likens films to dreams, as both are steeped in our subconscious fears and desires.

Hear Tupitsyn read her story Kleptomania; a tale that exposes the grotesque misogyny of Hollywood, through the fantasy meeting of three leading ladies.

Sacred Monster

Even in her first book, published when she was nineteen, she was fond of the exquisite abstraction:

The dark, murky night was cut in half, separated into two sombre blocks of sleep. Where was she? Between the two halves, seeing them—the half she had already slept and the half she still had to sleep—isolated in the timeless and in the spaceless, in an empty gap. That interval would be discounted from the years of life.

—Near to the Wild Heart

Furthermore, her relationship to animals grew increasingly spiritual, taking Spinoza's pantheism into the heart of both her life (dogs were often her closest friends) and her work. In some of her narratives animals seem a stay against the abyss; other times they reflect that abyss in their eyes, in a manner resembling a destroying lover. She sometimes pits an animal and a person in a dialectic of mutual assassination. She is interested in the complexity of a creature: the eyes of a cockroach; the mute, humid hippopotamus; cats mistaken for suckling pigs.

excerpt from Lorrie Moore's The Brazilian Sphinx, a reveiw of Benjamin Moser's Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector published in The New York Reveiw of Books, Volume 56, Number 14.