3 Questions with Jeff Sharlet

We are pleased to present our latest “3 Questions”, this time featuring our friend, neighbor, and 2017 Pages in the Pub presenter, Jeff Sharlet. Mr. Sharlet, is also a journalist and Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College, and the author of many best-selling books, including including The Family, C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. Mr. Sharlet’s work has earned numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and the Outspoken Award. He is a contributing editor for Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and a frequent contributor to GQ.

Mr. Sharlet will visit the Norwich Bookstore at 7 pm on Tuesday, February 11th to discuss his latest book -- This Brilliant Darkness  -- a very personal exploration of life today. (Please note his visit is on a Tuesday, instead of the usual Wednesday.)

1. What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

The shaping of a writer is an ongoing process, so the first book that comes to mind is not one I read as an aspiring writer but as I was finishing This Brilliant Darkness: The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison, one of my favorite essayists. There's a phrase in TThe Recovering, which is meditation on creativity, addiction, and sobriety that I think better explains what I'm trying to work toward with my writing these days than anything I could say myself: "the saving alchemy of community."

Leslie and I became friends years ago over our shared love for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book of words and pictures published in 1941 by James Agee and Walker Evans. It's been thrilling to see This Brilliant Darkness compared to Agee, not least because I'll never be anywhere near the writer he was. But there is, I hope, an affinity of ambition, a hope that one might find a different, or "new" nonfiction language for representing the real.

There's a related affinity with Joseph Mitchell's portraits of a man named Joe Gould in his collection of 1940s-60s New Yorker pieces, Up in the Old Hotel, my copy of which I bought for $5 from a homeless street book seller around two in the morning, after leaving St. Vincent's Hospital in the West Village, to which I'd taken a friend in a crisis. This was back in the early 90s, I was just out of college, I think, and I was taken by Gould's delusional dream of an Oral History of Our Times, which would be the longest book ever written, neverending, "'the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude,’” as Gould told Mitchell, “‘what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows,'... a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey." A story in which the ordinary is extraordinary, and everything matters. ​

2. What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?

I'm working on a chapter about the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz for a new book about the books that can never be finished. Schulz was a strange, lonely little man who almost never left his hometown of Drohobych, where he worked as an art teacher and wrote two astonishing collections of stories of fantastical worlds contained within his family's apartment, The Street of Crocodiles and Under the Sign of the Sanatorium, and struggled to finish a vast novel called The Messiah. The novel was scattered to the winds when the Nazis killed him, but it lives on in fiction about the missing novel by Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman, Roberto Bolano, Philip Roth. I don't imagine Schulz would reveal too much of his oceanic imagination over coffee, but I think of a line from his story "The Booke" (an awkward translation of the Polish, ksiega, for a sort of sacred book, which to Schulz was the book yet to be written: "under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?" A little creepy, sure! So were his stories. But even more they were beautiful. I'd gladly hold Bruno Schulz's hand. ​

3. What books are currently on your bedside table?

Walking up the stairs... let's see... it's crowded...
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Are You Listening, a new eerie and gorgeous graphic novel of a road trip through the West Texas night by Tillie Walden (purchased at the Norwich Bookstore).

Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams, who just gave a deep and powerful reading in Norwich that bowled over both me and my ten-year-old daughter.

Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. Smith, purchased at the Norwich Bookstore, not yet read, which I bought not because Smith was the Poet Laureate of the United States but because one of my students, completely unaware that she was famous at all, fell in love with her poems. 
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Up the Junction, by Nell Dunn, a great little book, of reported sketches--drawings and in rich vernacular prose--of everyday working class life in early 1960s London, given to me by James Napoli, the founder of the Upper Valley's Junction Magazine. 

Casting Deep Shade, the poet C.D. Wright's last book, just published, with photographs by Denny Moers. It's about beech trees, which sounds, to me, very boring. If you think Moby-Dick is boring, you'll probably find this boring, too, but if not -- well, beech trees are Wright's white whale.

Agee on Film: In the 1940s James Agee was legendary-in-his-own-time film critic for The Nation. He didn't like much of what he saw and I've seen almost none of the movies about which he writes, but together his criticism is a story of an increasingly broken-hearted man trying to remember love.

Lilith's Brood, by Octavia E. Butler, a single-volume set of one of Butler's afrofuturist trilogies. Butler will be the final chapter in the new book that will begin with Schulz. Her unfinished book, which I wish I had on my bedside, was The Parable of the Trickster, meant to be the final volume of her final trilogy. All her books had been "NO" books, she said, dystopian, deeply critical of the world. In the final one, she said, she wanted to write a "YES" book, to imagine freedom and in doing so make it real. She died trying. ​