Matthew Sharpe: Nothing is Terrible
		"Love is mysterious. As you get older, your understanding increases, but so does the amount of pain you must endure, so it may seem as if you are standing still." --from Nothing is Terrible by Matthew Sharpe The narrator of Matthew Sharpe's new novel is a clever, unkind young memoirist, sexually precocious and possessed of no small capacity for cruelty. Sold by her uncle and aunt at a young age, she becomes the foster child and kept girl of a wealthy Manhattan woman whose love she can return only incompletely. The Manhattan that springs up around Mary White is a carnival paradise populated by drug-peddling math prodigies, philosopher-supermodels, and urban survivalists. It is a paradise she roams with total freedom, knowing that those who are most devoted to her, and not she, will pay the price for her pursuit of a life that is "one long coitus." In this issue of Bold Type, Matthew Sharpe reads his favorite passages from Nothing is Terrible, offers an essay in memory of William S. Burroughs, a story from his collection Stories from the Tube, and an excerpt in which Mary White's sickly brother meets a grisly fate. --Anson Lang
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