Works by
Matthew Sharpe
(Writer)

Stories from the Tube (1998)
In Stories from the Tube, Matthew Sharpe spins ten unique and unforgettable tales inspired by the most mundane, ubiquitous texts in our culture: television commercials. With echoes of writers as diverse as Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, and David Foster Wallace, these stories create a world in which the utterly normal and the utterly surreal collide, shatter, and reassemble themselves, where the totally insane and hilarious and the deeply moving occupy the same space. In the process, they speak volumes about how television reflects and distorts our imaginations and emotional lives, and how it both creates and destroys the mythology of the American family.

        In "Doctor Mom," a suburban mother practices medicine illegally out of her home after being stripped of her medical license. In "How I Greet My Daughter," an agoraphobic, misanthropic woman wakes to the smell of brewing coffee and realizes her grown daughter has moved in. In "Cloud," a young publishing executive traveling by airplane meets a mysterious lover whose touch is as cold and vapor-ous as a cloud. In "The Woman Who," a New York woman finds the needy and desperate beating a path to her door after she briefly and inexplicably turned into Marilyn Mon-roe during a matinee of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

        By turns haunting, savagely funny, and unexpectedly touching, Stories from the Tube is the striking debut of a writer of uncommon talent and vision.

Nothing Is Terrible: A Novel (2000)
Matthew Sharpe's debut collection, Stories from the Tube, was praised in the Los Angeles Times Book Review for its "wildly effective-and often touching-collisions of the banal and the surreal." Wiredcalled it "unsettling, lovely, creepy"; Forbes FYI heralded it as a "remarkable fiction debut." In Nothing Is Terrible, his first novel, Sharpe astonishes once again with the hallucinatory and hilarious story of a girl's unusual coming-of-age and her search for love in unlikely places.

Her name is Mary White, though she prefers to be called Paul, the name of her ill-fated twin brother. Bright, pragmatic, irreverent, and orphaned, she is being raised by her clueless aunt and uncle and fears she may be about to drown in dull suburban torpor-until she falls in love with her new sixth-grade teacher, Miss Skip Hartman. Devoted teacher and pupil run off to live in New York City, where Mary receives a very unconventional education (art dealers, drug dealers, boyfriends, epic piercings) and discovers redemptive power in even the most unorthodox kind of love, all of which she relates in the most Brontëan gentle-reader tone.

In Nothing Is Terrible, Matthew Sharpe takes the bildungsroman and turns it upside down and inside out. Like a breakneck sprint through a Manhattan house of mirrors, it offers readers a giddily literate tour of the resourceful mind of a singular young woman.

The Sleeping Father (2003)
A divorced dad of two teenagers inadvertently combines two incompatible antidepressant medications, goes into a coma, has a stroke, and emerges with brain damage. His teenage son and daughter, Chris and Cathy, inherit some money and decide to rehabilitate their father on their own. The Sleeping Father is about the shift in the way Americans think about mental health — from regarding personality as being shaped by one’s upbringing to its being shaped by the bloodstream’s hormone levels. In focusing on one family in crisis, Sharpe addresses the larger crisis in faith and authority in contemporary American life. Ultimately, this is a weird but wonderful story about two children who, not having an adequate father, decide to make one.

Jamestown (2007 release)
Jamestown chronicles a group of “settlers” (more like survivors) from the ravaged island of Manhattan, departing just as the Chrysler Building has mysteriously plummeted to the earth. This ragged band is heading down what’s left of I-95 in a half-school bus, half-Millennium Falcon. Their goal is to establish an outpost in southern Virginia, find oil, and exploit the Indians controlling the area. Based on actual accounts of the Jamestown settlement from 1607 to 1617, Jamestown features historical characters including John Smith, Pocahontas, and others enacting an imaginative re-version of life in the pioneer colony. In this retelling, Pocahontas’s father Powhatan is half-Falstaff, half-Henry V, while his consigliere is a psychiatrist named Sidney Feingold. John Martin gradually loses body parts in a series of violent encounters, and John Smith is a ruthless and pragmatic redhead continually undermining the aristocratic leadership. Communication is by text-messaging, IMing, and, ultimately, telepathy. Punctuated by jokes, rhymes, “rim shot” dialogue, and bloody black-comic tableaux, Jamestown is a trenchant commentary on America's past and present that confirms Matthew Sharpe’s status as a major talent in contemporary fiction.