Nominally Christian churches glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while others celebrate an ecstatic indulgence in hate, citing Scripture whilst preparing for civil war. Lonely men gather to rage against women. There, too, in the undertow, the forty-fifth president of the United States, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood, and the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on 6 January at the US Capitol, is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood.

Both political inquiry and meditation, as poetic as it is profound and disturbing, The Undertow captures a decade of growing division in the US: roughly 2011-2021. Jeff Sharlet examines currents of gender, faith and money that brought us to the "Trumpocene," and finally, explores a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism. Beginning and closing with freedom songs of the past whose critique of American failures are nonetheless a vision of American possibility, The Undertow is a necessary reckoning with the present, precarious condition.

About the Author
Jeff Sharlet is the New York Times best-selling author or editor of eight books, including The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War and The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, adapted into a Netflix documentary series. His reporting on LGBTIQ+ rights around the world has received the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and Outright International's Outspoken Award. His writing and photography have appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor; the New York Times Magazine; GQ; Esquire; Harper's Magazine; and VQR, for which he is an editor at large. He is the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where he lives in the woods with many animals.

Reviews
"A riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America." -- Joseph O'Neill - The New York Times Book Review
"[Sharlet's] stories are as necessary as they are harrowing. The writing is explicit and expansive, almost cinematic, like looking at a battlefield from above. Altogether, it's a rare achievement, a cultural-political book that is literary.... [The Undertow] has a narrative arc that captures the fever pitch of the past decade." -- Ann Neumann - The Guardian
"[The Undertow] is journalism-as-art, attempting to capture the mood of the nation at this fraught moment, that others in the future may know how it felt to live through the present. Hopefully there will still be readers then." -- Adam Fleming Petty - The Washington Post
"[The Undertow] is a foreboding drive through the backroads of the country's rising militancy. From campy Trump rallies and a memorial service for the January 6 insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt to a televangelist's church in Miami and a self-declared prophet in Omaha, Sharlet takes a hard, unwavering look at the nation's guns-and-Bibles underbelly" -- James Sullivan - The Boston Globe
"Sharlet's startling, Didion-esque The Undertow, with its CinemaScope landscapes and slightest of hopes, visits the dirt lanes and country rallies where Christian nationalism threatens. " -- Chicago Tribune


Awards
Short-listed for National Book Critics Circle Award 2023.



Book Information
ISBN 9781324006497
Author Jeff Sharlet
Format Hardback
Page Count 352
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 539g
Dimensions(mm) 236mm * 157mm * 30mm