In 2004 novelist Susan Isaacs, who at the time had been invited to select the Today Show's book club pick, noticed a title next to the New York Times best-seller list. That's right, next to, on the recto page, in the And Bear in Mind column, she read a brief description of Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father, published by Soft Skull Press. Although she knew nothing about the author or the publisher, she was intrigued by the title. "I thought to myself, 'For twenty, twenty-five bucks I can be a sport.'"

Once she began reading the novel, Isaacs—the author of eleven novels herself, most of them New York Times best-sellers—was hooked. Set in suburban Connecticut, The Sleeping Father follows Bernie Schwartz, a divorced father who accidentally mixes two types of antidepressants—causing first a coma and then brain damage—and his children Chris and Cathy, who decide to take on rehabilitating their father themselves. What made The Sleeping Father stand out for Isaacs was "the wonderfully effortless way" that Sharpe switches points of view among the characters. "But also the humanity of it," she says. "I just thought it was first-rate. And I didn't see why any big publisher didn't just grab it and push the hell out of it."

Isaacs chose The Sleeping Father for the Today Show's book club, and she and Sharpe appeared on national television with Katie Couric to announce the selection. But what made Sharpe's success truly astounding was the fact that The Sleeping Father had been rejected by twenty big publishing houses, including Villard—the publisher that had put out his first two books, Stories From the Tube (1998) and Nothing Is Terrible (2000). "No commercial publisher would have me," he says. Instead, the book was published by Brooklyn-based indie press Soft Skull.

The selection of The Sleeping Father for the Today Show's book club "more than quintupled sales," says Sharpe—the novel has sold twenty thousand copies, a significant figure for a literary title. It has been translated into nine other languages and was optioned by Warner Brothers for a film to be produced by Michael London, whose credits include The Family Stone, Sideways, and House of Sand and Fog.

It makes sense that Sharpe, of all writers, has become a poster boy of small press success. Like many indie publishers that find creative ways to promote their titles, Sharpe is an innovator. His books are highly imaginative works, at turns devastatingly poignant and equally hilarious. Propelled by classic human dilemmas, they are also decidedly of our time, written in lyrical prose that perfectly captures the voices of his varied, quirky characters.

Sharpe's new book, Jamestown, published this month by Soft Skull, falls right in rank with his work so far, although it's perhaps slightly more ambitious. The novel is a reimagining of the settling in 1607 of the first English colony in America—Jamestown—after a hundred or so Englishmen sponsored by the Virginia Company set sail from London. Once there, they endured battles with the Algonquian natives, illness, and starvation.

Sharpe's novel stays true to the major events that occurred between the colonists and the Algonquians, and its characters include historical figures Captain John Smith, colonist John Rolfe, Chief Powhatan, and one of history's most celebrated characters, Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas. The narrative shifts among the various characters' perspectives. Although not entirely epistolary, many of the chapters begin as letters the characters are writing, often to no one. The book begins, for example, in the voice of "Johnny" Rolfe: "To whoever is out there, if anyone is out there: Today has been an awful day in a run of awful days as long as life so far." While the letters lend the book a historical quality—like reading a first-person account from the past—this is not a historical novel. Sharpe's characters live in a postapocalyptic, environmentally devastated America. They set out in search of oil but become more interested in the Algonquian methods for purifying food and water.

"I wanted to write a book that was set in the past, the present, and the future all at the same time," says Sharpe. "Many of the chapters have point-by-point correspondences to things that happened in 1607, 1608. So that's the past part. Setting it in the future in which some kind of military annihilation has taken place is the future part, and then the present is the bridge between those two—the fact that the novel starts with this group of guys getting on an armored bus, leaving the island of Manhattan, and turning around to see the Chrysler building collapse into the ground unequivocally makes it about the present as well."

Although Soft Skull is committed to Sharpe for the long haul and interested in supporting whatever he chooses to write, Nash says he was drawn to Jamestown in particular for "the sheer ballsiness of it. I mean, here's a writer who has a breakout success with a dysfunctional suburban family novel, and what does he follow it up with?"

Sharpe, who splits his time between his home in Manhattan and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he teaches writing and literature, was born in 1962 and grew up in the suburbs of New York City. He says that he wanted to be a writer from about the age of ten. "My father is a publisher and my mother writes fiction and poetry and is a singer and songwriter, so the idea of writing and being an artist was a possibility that I was surrounded by constantly as a child." His father's company, M. E. Sharpe, publishes mostly academic books in the social sciences as well as journals and reference books. His mother, Jacqueline Steiner, is a noted folksinger whose achievements include cowriting the song, "MTA" (also known as "Charlie on the MTA"), which the Kingston Trio made famous with their 1959 recording.

Sharpe attended Oberlin College in Ohio, then moved in 1985 to New York City, where he began working in production for such commercial magazines as US and Condé Nast Traveler and writing fiction in his free time. He took classes at the 92nd Street Y where he met Lore Segal, who he cites as one of the most important teachers he's had and to whom he dedicated Jamestown. "She taught me how to edit my own work," he says. "She understood it, and—despite how semi-fledged I was then as a writer and a grown-up—she spoke to me about it with a seriousness that was very helpful."

In 1990 Sharpe attended Columbia University to purse his MFA. As part of a work study program, he taught writing in New York City public schools with Teachers & Writers Collaborative. He also assembled a short story collection as his thesis, which he tried unsuccessfully to get published. After graduating he wrote a novel and began working with agent Molly Friedrich, the cousin of a friend of his, to find a home for it. "There was one day, sometime in the mid '90s, when seventeen publishers got back to my agent all saying no," he says. "That was a hard day in my life."

After Columbia, Sharpe returned to working in magazine production, mostly for Self. He also wrote the occasional article for glossy magazines like GQ and continued writing fiction on the side. Eventually, though, the production work began to grate on him. "I remember very consciously: I actually became fixated on the radio in the production room playing the commercial station, and I couldn't take it anymore. I would start hyperventilating. That was a symptomatic key that something needed to change," he says with a laugh. Having completed another story collection, Stories From the Tube, and started a novel, Sharpe quit, lived off of his savings for a year, and finished the novel.

Nothing Is Terrible is a contemporary bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale based on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre—although Sharpe didn't initially plan it that way. "It was actually midway through the book that I realized, 'Oh, I'm rewriting Jane Eyre, aren't I.' I didn't notice all the parallels at first," he says. In Sharpe's version, Jane is a hermaphrodite named Mary who is orphaned when her parents are killed in an automobile accident. She goes to live with her aunt and uncle, loses her twin brother, Paul, to death by bee stings, and eventually is adopted by her sixth-grade teacher, who becomes her lover. Mary's voice, which narrates the story, combines the creepy wisdom and innocent humor that comes along with the untainted perspective of childhood, transforming the grim plot into a compelling and devastatingly comical story.

Along with examining taxonomies of gender, Sharpe was interested in the idea of character development—something he says we now take as a given in realistic fiction. "Do characters develop? Do people learn from their mistakes? Not in my experience," he says. "It seems like one of the lessons of Freud is that not only do people not become wiser as a result of trauma, they seem to become stupider. They seem to become frozen in the time of the trauma, and only in a kind of Herculean effort are they able to understand and move on from their traumas."

With Nothing Is Terrible finished, his new agent, Jennifer Hengen at Sterling Lord, began shopping both books around. Bruce Tracy at Villard Books offered a two-book deal, and Sharpe accepted.

Sharpe says the editorial process at Villard was fine, but that he felt "lost in the sauce" when it came to the actual publishing of the books. "This is a fairly common story. I was just one of many relatively unknown authors that these big corporate-owned houses publish. If things don't start going well immediately upon publication they move their resources elsewhere." While the books sold modestly, they were, on the whole, well received by critics and reviewed in such places as Bookforum, the New York Times Book Review, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

By the time Sharpe finished his next novel, Hengen had decided to leave the business and the author was working with agent David McCormick, who had a tough time finding a home for it. "I think all the publishers, all the editors that he pitched it to, had access to the sales figures of the first two books, which were dreadful or at least by their standards were dreadful," Sharpe says. "I was happy that more than say, my mother, father, sister, and a couple of friends had bought the books."

Sharpe asked McCormick to try Soft Skull, which he had heard about from his friend, writer Eileen Myles; she had published her first novel, Cool for You, there in 2000. "I admire Eileen, and the book seemed to be making its way into the world in a nice way," says Sharpe. "The first time [McCormick] called me with a response from Soft Skull, he said, 'I spoke to the editor of Soft Skull. He called me from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Midwest. He's on the lam at the moment.'" That editor was Soft Skull founder Sander Hicks, who ran the show before Richard Nash took over in 2001. Hicks had published a negative biography of George W. Bush called Fortunate Son, and the author of it had committed suicide. "I guess Sander thought that it was not a suicide," says Sharpe, "that it was an assassination, or so the story was told to me—I've never actually spoken to Sander about it. I thought, 'So much for Soft Skull.'"

About a year later, McCormick called Sharpe and told him that Soft Skull had finally made an offer. "I said, 'So are they going to publish it on a mimeograph in their darkened motel room in Nebraska?' He said, 'No, they're under new management.'"

Sharpe couldn't be happier at Soft Skull. "I feel like Cinderella or something. It's been amazing. Everything is on a more human scale, and you know who's making all the decisions. As Richard said to me at one point, 'I wish you well, I like your book, but you should also know that if your book doesn't do well, I'm screwed. So I really have to make it work.' That's how he treats every title that he does, and it turns out to be really good for everybody."

Before he started writing The Sleeping Father, Sharpe had a vague idea of wanting to write about the shift over the past couple of decades in American mental-health care, away from the talk-therapy model and toward the pill-taking model. "I think behind that therapeutic model there's a governing idea about what a self is, what a person is. The talk model is the narrative model, and the pill model is the biochemical model. I wanted to write a novel that in some way investigates what it feels like to be a self, now that we are determined by chemistry and electricity instead of by narratives."

Sharpe already had extensive knowledge about the psychoanalytic model and was well versed in the ideas of psychoanalytical theorists such as Freud, Lacan, and D. W. Winnicott, among others—so he began reading about antidepressant medication. There he stumbled upon the disturbing detail of what happens when two classes of antidepressants, serotonin reuptake inhibitors and monoamine oxidase inhibitors, are mixed. "Something bad has to happen to somebody for you to be able to write a novel about it," Sharpe says. Thus, the story was born.

The Sleeping Father shares some themes with Nothing Is Terrible. In both books, children not only endure hardship, but also are left to their own devices in an often negligent adult world. Sharpe says that, again, he never set out to make any such commentary. But he admits: "It does seem that we live in a culture that tends to promote a kind of perpetual adolescence. Look, I understand that those pills are extremely helpful to a lot of people, but when I read the statistic—I'm sure it's changed by now, this was in 2003—that a hundred and twenty million Americans were prescribed antidepressants, and at that time there were not that much more than twice that number of us, it seemed high to me. It does seem like people, with the supersaturation of the culture with advertising and marketing, are constantly being asked to turn to products to cope with what ails them, the difficulties of life. There's a reliance on the product as a kind of authority, as a kind of solution, as opposed to relying on, well, other people or one's self."

While Sharpe often has a general idea when he begins writing, novels, he says, "are about people, not ideas." And it is through the voice of the characters that he discovers plot and everything else. "I just sort of drink a lot of coffee and sit down and start fantasizing and see what happens," he says. "Some writers plan things more meticulously than others, but for me—not only can I not do it any other way, but it also turns out to be one of the great pleasures of writing."

Jamestown is the closest he's come to writing a novel with a clear direction in mind. "It's a more explicitly political book than I've ever written. Certainly my process was still quite intuitive and irrational, but my intuition and irrational thoughts were quite focused—and still are—on the intense frustration of being an American at this moment and being led by these people who, it strikes me, really are hastening the end of the American empire. This is maybe not such a bad thing, but I don't know that it needs to be done quite so violently."

Violence is everywhere in Jamestown. The colonists, who are constantly vying for power in the pecking order, have daily physical squabbles; the Native Americans are equally savage to each other and the colonists, flaying their enemies, for example, with sharpened mussel shells, a detail that Sharpe pulled from his research.

In fact, the genesis of the book came from a research project Sharpe began in his capacity as a teacher. As a result of his work for Teachers & Writers at Columbia in the early '90s, he started leading professional development workshops in writing for public school teachers. He was asked in the late '90s to compose some creative writing exercises for a group of middle school social studies teachers in Queens who were planning to teach a unit on Jamestown. After reading Captain John Smith's accounts of his sojourn in Jamestown and developing the exercises, Sharpe found himself compelled by the material. "I was drawn to the mix of foreignness and familiarity in the voice of Smith, whom I now think of as a proto–Founding Father, for good and ill," Sharpe says. "I was also drawn to the sheer weirdness and extremity of the story: a hundred Englishmen—yes, all men!—boarding a ship, sailing for months, arriving at this unfamiliar place, getting shot with arrows, trying to speak and negotiate with a group of natives with whom they shared not a single word in common. And how weird and awful this must have been for the natives: Here come these pale, hairy, bad-smelling, overdressed, rude interlopers on enormous ships, with thunderous, deadly metal weapons, blithely moving in on their turf. Sometime around then I began to conceive of doing a big old Jamestown creative writing project myself."

The speech patterns of the 1600s were something that he wanted to make reference to in Jamestown. "I wanted the book to bear the imprint or have the stain not only of contemporary speech patterns and diction, but also of Elizabethan and Jacobean speech patterns, so I turned to my favorite writer of that period, Shakespeare." The prose in Jamestown combines the rhythms of text-messaging patter with iambic meter, allusions to hip-hop culture and canonical poetry (Wallace Stevens's, in particular) strewn throughout.

Language in general—its potential, limits, power, and failings—is a major concern in Sharpe's work. He sees the language barrier between the English and the Algonquians as a model for "the way in which each of us has our own private associations that inform every word that comes out of our mouths. Communication," Sharpe says, "is always an act of translation."

Soft Skull's Nash is particularly committed to promoting Jamestown, not only because he believes in the book, but also to show support for a writer who, despite having received such success, has decided to stay with a small press. But Nash's efforts were complicated by the news last December that Advance Marketing Services, the company that owns Publishers Group West (PGW), a distributor of many independent publishers, including Soft Skull Press, declared bankruptcy, leaving numerous publishers unpaid for a portion of sales.

Nash says that the situation did not affect publishing plans for Jamestown, but did make their execution more difficult. However, in typical small press resourcefulness, Nash arranged a deal with Harcourt, the paperback publisher of Jamestown, to prepay the on-publication part of the book's advance, which gave Soft Skull the funds to publish Jamestown on time, with an initial print run of fifteen thousand copies. In another act of small press innovation, Soft Skull has created a MySpace page for Pocahontas at www.myspace.com/146577234 [3].

Sharpe has the usual grandiose hopes for his book that any writer would, but he tries not to get too invested in them. "There was a much bigger readership for The Sleeping Father than there had been for my two previous books, but I don't know, the marketplace is so fickle." And although filled with humor and delightful for its lyricism, Jamestown is a harsh book for what it says about American culture. But the act of writing itself is a positive one that's inherently hopeful. "It is a redemptive activity that I've devoted my life to, both as a writer and teacher," says Sharpe. "I put tremendous stock in language as a potential vehicle for redemption."

Mary Gannon is the editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.