Stories from the tube
By: Matthew Sharpe.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Villard Books
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 228
Subjects: Television advertising -- Adaptations; Family -- United States -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
Description: 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. 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 vaporous 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 Monroe during a matinee of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Table of contents: title: Tide; title: Cloud; title: In the snowy kingdom; title: The woman who; title: Rose in the house; title: A car; title: How I greet my daughter; title: Bridesmaids; title: Doctor Mom; title: A bird accident.