-offers an unfolding puzzle representing the psyche that is at once explosive, funny, dark, sweet, pained, and utterly strange.

THE BOOK

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.

PRAISE

“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 J. WIERSEMA, Quill and Quire, starred review

“Wistful, dark, and complex, Damian Tarnopolsky’s Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster is an idiosyncratic journey through all the messy, disparate, and contradictory parts of being, or becoming, a person.” JEN RAWLINSON, Hamilton Review of Books

“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

EVENTS

-August 27th, 7pm: Vancouver Launch: Upstart and Crow

-September 12th, 6pm: Mississauga: Ampersand Reading Series

-October 22nd, 7pm: Launch, presented by Toronto Lit Up:
My House in the Junction
2882 Dundas St. West, Toronto, ON M6P 1Y8

-October 29th, 6pm: Toronto: Drunk Fiction

-November 5th, 7pm: Zoom: The Writers' Union of Canada Open Mic Night

-November 10th, 6:30pm: Toronto: Junction Reads

-November 19th: Vaughan: Civic Centre Resource Library

-December 1st, 7pm: Toronto: Bright Lit Big City

-April 4th: Toronto: Angel Reading Series

LIKES etc.

-All Lit Up features Every Night… on their Holiday Reading Edit