Nothing Is Terrible - A Novel

Zusatztext "Did you think you had outgrown surprise?  Matthew Sharpe's hilarious new novel is guaranteed to keep you off kilter in our terrible new world where Nothing is Terrible."                                                         --Lore Segal "Fans of Steven Millhauser and Jonathan Ames will find a kindred spirit in Matthew Sharpe.  His sly wit and capacity for literary invention are fully realized by a voice that is distinguished, warm, and inviting.  Each page of Nothing is Terrible offers its own treasure and--the hallmark of a truly fine novel--the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."                                                         --Dale Peck Informationen zum Autor Matthew Sharpe is the author of Stories from the Tube . He has published stories in Zoetrope , Harper's , American Letters and Commentary , Witness , The Quarterly , and Fiction . He lives in New York. Klappentext 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. Leseprobe At 5:00 pm on the day I began helping Myra in the garden, Tommy arrived home and removed his blue service uniform and bathed and put on a white cotton dress shirt and pink Bermuda shorts and suede athletic shoes with no socks. He could have been living in Darien, Connecticut, in that outfit, with the rolled-up sleeves that fell away gracefully from his thin forearms, and with his narrow, elegantly muscled legs sparsely covered with golden hair. He walked into the kitchen, a room still bright at 5:20 pm. Myra had mixed up a batch of powdered lemonade, which he preferred to the kind she knew how to make with real lemons and sugar and water. There was such a lovely feeling of coolness about a room Myra had cleaned and arranged in which Tommy stood wearing his Bermudas and drinking lemonade.          "You want to throw around a baseball?" he said. "Hey! You deaf? Mary. Baseball?" "Me?" "No, all the other people named Mary." "Okay."          I ran and got my glove and joined Tommy in the backyard, which Myra had mown short the way he liked it.          "I'm gonna pitch first for a while. You squat down over there, and when you catch ëem, just toss ëem back lightly. If there's time before dark, you can pitch a few also."          I squatted and Tommy, holding the ball, got himself up into the sequence of preparatory attitudes of the major league pitcheróscuffing at the ground with the toe of one shoe, hands behind him, left side toward me; staring down the opponent, which, since there was no batter,...

Product details

• Authors: Matthew Sharpe
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.02.2000
• EAN: 9780812992274
• ISBN: 978-0-8129-9227-4
• No. of pages: 284
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 216 mm x 19 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature