Jeff Sharlet

Biography

Jeff Sharlet is an associate professor of creative writing at Dartmouth College and a VQR Editor at Large. He is the author or editor of six books, including The Family (Harper Perennial, 2009), Sweet Heaven When I Die (Norton, 2011), and, most recently, Radiant Truths (Yale, 2014).

See Work

ESSAYS / Summer 2017

Telemetry

By Jeff Sharlet

For two years I’ve been walking into the tall grass to take snapshots of this field at the top of the “crooked mile,” a winding hill that leads into the shallow valley of swamp and stream in which my house stands, just past the sign that...
#VQRTRUESTORY / Spring 2017

Not Even My Own

By Jeff Sharlet

I thought they were wild but I’m told irises rarely are. Planted; invasive; European, mostly, or Asian. But there are natives, too. These, with their ribbed yellow tongues, resemble an iris called the wild flag, which grows from Nova Scotia...
#VQRTRUESTORY / Spring 2016

Dubliners

By Jeff Sharlet
PROFILES / Fall 2013

Voice and Hammer

By Jeff Sharlet

Once, more than half a century ago, he was the handsomest man in the world. A radiant man. It was a matter of bearing, of voice and gesture and timing. He had that high, buttery baritone, nothing special really, except, he says, “I knew how...
CRITICISM / Summer 2013

Like a Novel: The Marketing of Literary Nonfiction

By Jeff Sharlet

Offered up by blurbers with the best of intentions, the immediacy implicit in the description like a novel suggests that the book on hand can be engaged with as art rather than as fact, so realist it’s not real; a story rather than the...
AUDIO

A Harry Belafonte Playlist

Photography by Jeff Sharlet

I like stories that allow me to linger, to circle back, to return to a set of words, an image, a song I can’t get out of my mind. In writing “Voice and Hammer,” it was the 1959 broadcast of Tonight With Belafonte, and the chain-gang songs...

CRITICISM

Like a Novel

By Jeff Sharlet