If the sound bite is the new order, then how do we make every word count? In today's surplus world of communication overload and cultural clutter, writer and cultural critic Masha Tupitsyn turns to the media matrix of Twitter to explore the changing ways that we construct and consume narrative. Loosely applying the discerning aphorism-a compressed genre in itself-to a 21st century context, LACONIA: 1,200 TWEETS ON FILM offers meditations on film and popular culture that resonant with laconic meaning and personal insight while getting to the heart of the matter. Inspired by Chris Marker's free-associative film impressions in La Jet ee and Sans Soleil, LACONIA is part film diary, part cultural inventory, and part mashup. Pulling from an array of film, popular culture, books, and mainstream news, it offers penetrating critical commentary on an increasingly muddled virtual world. LACONIA consists of brick by brick prose, as Tupitsyn thinks in sentences and lines that culminate in an architecture of thinking.

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.

A multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen. In exchange for studying what each fraudulent cell looks like under a merciless commercial and commodified lens, viewers enable late-capitalism to run more smoothly by calling in with their votes, as is the case with Reality TV. From the inside, secrecy appears eradicated, as though secrets or coded transparencies comprise the totality of injustice, rather than just one part. Justice is reduced to a vantage point. We see and we see and we see ad infinitum. -from Picture Cycle With her debut collection Beauty Talk & Monsters (2007), Masha Tupitsyn established a new genre of hybrid writing that melded film criticism, philosophy, and autobiography. Picture Cycle continues Tupitsyn's multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen. Composed over a ten-year period, Picture Cycle is a pioneering collection whose sharp and knowing vignette-like essays form a critical autobiography of the daily images in our lives. Deftly covering a range of theoretical and cinematic frameworks, Tupitsyn traces here the quickly vanishing line between onscreen and offscreen, predigital and postdigital. The result is a unique intellectual study of the uncanny formation of our life's biographies through images.