The Blurb
From the tangled threads of a messed-up family to the timeless themes of consciousness, love, art, and death, Damian Tarnopolsky’s narrative journey takes readers through past, present, and future, with stories ranging from 1980s England to present-day Canada alongside visions of Renaissance France and worlds yet to come.
Each tale stands alone and takes its own stylistic direction, but they connect and reflect back on each other in unexpected, touching, and sometimes jarring ways. As characters from different times and places converge, the result is a mosaic of emotions and insights that mirror the complexities of a self in time.
With echoes of Chekhov, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jennifer Egan, this is a collection that transcends the boundaries of traditional storytelling, offering a glimpse into the workings of human relationships, inheritance, and experience.
Why I want to read this book
I took an online course run by the Narrative Medicine Lab, Temerty School of Medicine, University of Toronto, where Damian was one of the facilitators. He was generous with his praise, kind with his critique, and asked just the right questions to make us reflect deeply on our stories. When I learned he was a writer, I picked up one of his books – Lanzmann and Other Stories – and found it intriguing with its complex characters and dark, deep plots. This one – Monk/Monster – I believe, from reading the following reviews, is deeper and darker!
“With Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster, Damian Tarnopolsky has crafted one of the most intriguing, original pieces of fiction you are liable to read this year.”
ROBERT WIERSEMA, Quill and Quire, starred review
“I’ve never read anything quite like this book. It’s a gem whose facets seem familiar until you turn it slightly and find it refracting in a completely unpredictable way: by turns searching, scary, and humane.” CRAIG DAVIDSON, author of Cataract City
“Monk/Monster is a connected series of painful and amazing stories. One story concerns a job interview, a pistol, and a confused narrator just clinging to sanity, all told in a torrential stream of consciousness prose, a pleasing chaos, like Nabokov on acid. Often the reader is deep in a character’s head, yet outside watching and gathering clues. Nothing is spelt out and old family lore hovers; the effect is comic and chilling and the writing is artful and very impressive.”
MARK ANTHONY JARMAN, author of 19 Knives
About the Author
Damian Tarnopolsky is a writer, editor and a teacher. He teaches at the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab at the University of Toronto. His work, Goya’s Dog, was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean). He won the Voaden Prize for Playwriting in 2019. His short fiction has appeared in The Puritan, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, subTerrain, Audeamus, and elsewhere, and has twice been nominated for the Journey Prize, as well as the CBC Literary Award.
Click here to buy yourself a copy of the book