Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster

Damian Tarnopolsky

Freehand Books

Synopsis

A risk-taking, labyrinthine, and absolutely original collection of short stories.

Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster offers an unfolding puzzle of the human psyche that is at once explosive, funny, dark, sweet, pained, and utterly strange. 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 spanning from 1980s England to Renaissance France to present-day Canada to a world yet to come.

Each tale stands alone in its stylistic direction, only to 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.

About the Author

Damian Tarnopolsky is the author of Lanzmann and Other Stories, Goya’s Dog and The Defence. His work has been nominated for many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award and the Journey Prize, and he won the Voaden Prize for Playwriting in 2019. He teaches at the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab at the University of Toronto.

Read more about Damian Tarnopolsky

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