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Jan 20, 2025 | 
womensprize.com | Carol Diggory Shields |Kate Grenville |Sheila Heti |Rachel Elliott
Winner of the 1998 Women’s Prize for FictionIt’s easy to feel adrift at this time of year, with the return to work after the holidays and dreary weather making life feel like a maze. Larry Weller’s whole life feels like a labyrinth, with his job, wife, and passion all coming to him through coincidence or mistake.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
naturahoy.com | Jane Eastick |Sheila Heti |Francis Spufford |Danzy Senna
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. In keeping with our annual tradition, we asked three of our critics for their favorite books of the last year. Between them, they chose 15 books, three of them reissues, and the majority fiction.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
theparisreview.org | Sheila Heti
By Sheila Heti October 25, 2024 The Canadian writer Sam Shelstad’s third book, The Cobra and the Key, is a funny and charming satire of writing advice and the people who give it. The book is in the form of a writing manual, and its prologue begins:Imagine you are standing in a gymnasium with numerous wooden chests spread out across the floor. Each chest contains one of two things: either a cobra, or a story.
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Aug 17, 2024 | 
ft.com | Sheila Heti
In her 2024 book ‘Alphabetical Diaries’, the novelist Sheila Heti takes lines from her personal diaries, written over a decade, and...
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
jewishbookcouncil.org | Sheila Heti |Sarah Seltzer
Who doesn’t enjoy a (fictional!) tortured artist? My novel, The Singer Sisters, comes out this week and it doesn’t have just one or two, but rather an entire family of tortured artists. The Cantors and Zingermans are a dynasty of folk and rock singers who express their feelings about each other—and about life’s ups and down—via songs and performances, collaborations and covers, over the course of several tumultuous musical and political decades.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
harpers.org | Sheila Heti
Last spring, I flew across the continent to California and drove into the beautiful hills of Mill Valley to visit the independent publisher of A Course in Miracles. I wanted to learn more about this book, one of the strangest I had ever read. I had been in its thrall for months, and sensed that if I could understand how it had been written, I would understand everything. I would learn how to live and write anew, words would start flowing from my hands, and I would again be happy.
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May 28, 2024 | 
electricliterature.com | Kristjana Gunnars |Sheila Heti |Jennifer Kabat
In high school I read Adrienne Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. My copy is dog-eared with outlines of lips I drew on the cover and inside there are countless underlines in my teenaged scrawl. In the poems, Rich quotes from archives, weaving women’s letters and diaries to “stitch” (her word) a way to be then. (Her then was 1980s and still second-wave feminism trying to recover women’s voices).
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May 15, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Sheila Heti
It is common to say "I was heartbroken to hear" that so-and-so died, but I really do feel heartbroken having learned about Alice Munro, who died on Monday. As a writer, she modeled, in her life and art, that one must work with emotional sincerity and precision and concentration and depth - not on every kind of writing but on only one kind, the kind closest to one's heart. She has long been a North Star for many writers and was someone I have always felt guided by.
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Apr 3, 2024 | 
theparisreview.org | Sheila Heti
By Sheila Heti April 3, 2024 The one time I met Lauren Oyler in person was in New York in the spring of 2018. I had been closely following her work as a critic and admired her intelligence and fearlessness. That exuberant night, she sat mostly quietly, with a look of anger, through a long evening at a bar, which ended late, outside a pizza restaurant, over greasy slices.
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Feb 27, 2024 | 
washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti’s experimental new book, Alphabetical Diaries, is built on a singular premise: to record her thoughts over a 10-year period and then alphabetize them. What, a reader might wonder, constitutes a thought? For Heti, it’s a fully formed sentence, and rather than coding them according to theme or otherwise creating categories, her alphabetization is based entirely on the first letter of each sentence — which makes for a largely arbitrary arrangement.
