Life As We Show It: Writing on Film

“Twenty-five writers discuss attachments they formed for certain movies—ET, Shane and Rosemary's Baby acquire new significance and resonance after reading these inspired pieces of narrative nonfiction.”—John McFarland for Shelf Awareness

Feminist critic and award-winning fiction writer Masha Tupitsyn and filmmaker/writer Brian Pera edit this dynamic collection of essays, short stories and poetry that plays with the trope that life imitates art by asking: if movie-watching has become in itself a primary source of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating? A diverse group of acclaimed thinkers, including Lynne Tillman, Rebecca Brown, Wayne Koestenbaum and Stephen Beachy, address topics ranging from the public death of gay porn star Joey Stefano to classic Hollywood Westerns, E.T. and Josef Von Sternberg. Life As We Show It provides a provocative and thoughtful perspective on the relationship between film and watcher and the experience of viewing life through screen-colored glasses.

Other contributors include: Stephen Beachy, Robert Gluck, Fanny Howe, David Trinidad, Lidia Yuknavitch, Veronica Gonzalez, Kevin Killian, Myriam Gurba, Abdellah Taïa and Dodie Bellamy.

Brian Pera is the author of Troublemaker (St. Martin's Press) and the writer/director of the film The Way I See Things. The Way I See Things was selected as part of Los Angeles Outfest's Four in Focus program, was one of three finalists for the Scion First Time Filmmaker Award, and featured in the Focus section at The 2008 Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece. It continues to tour festivals. Pera has written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Stranger, Make/Shift, Mall Punk, Mirage, Nerve, Nest, Fanzine and The Commercial Appeal, among other publications. Masha Tupitsyn is a fiction writer and cultural critic. In 2004, she worked as the Assistant Literary Editor at BOMB Magazine. She is the author of Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007). She is currently working on her new book, Screen to Screen, a collection of essays. Her fiction and criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in Animal Shelter, Fanzine, Creative Aggression, the anthology Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century, Make/Shift, Bookforum, Fence, Five Fingers Review and San Francisco's KQED's The Writer's Block.