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 present-day Canada to visions of Renaissance France and 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 relationships, inheritance, and experience.

Damian Tarnopolsky is the author of Lanzmann and Other Stories, Goya’s Dog, The Defence, and Every Night I Dream I'm a Monk, Every Night I Dream I'm a Monster. 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, and lives in Toronto.

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"A connected series of painful and amazing stories. . . . a pleasing chaos, like Nabokov on acid. 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

"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