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by Sheila Heti
A thrilling confessional from the award-winning, beloved author of Pure Colour.
Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade's worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.
"Readers will become familiar with a set of thematic preoccupations: anxieties about professional success, churning erotic aspirations and frustrations, self-deprecating confessions masking self-regard. Heti provides some genuine fun in her invitation to discover more conventional coherence by reconstructing a chronological version of events ... An original form of self-exposure emerges as we see some of the author's verbal habits laid bare." ―Kirkus Reviews
"[An] arresting literary experiment ... What the book lacks in traditional narrative structure, Heti supplements with evocative snapshots of life, detailing broken love affairs, mediocre meals, and professional triumphs with the controlled chaos of a late-night thought spiral. She juxtaposes the mundane ('My book will be done this year!') and the profound ('I wonder if I wanted to be a writer because nobody ever told me the truth'). The arcs of friendships and romantic relationships are sliced up and remixed, raising subtextual questions about the linearity of time and the nature of change." ―Publishers Weekly
"Playful yet disciplined ... [Heti] knows how to engage the mundane details of life with curiosity and thoughtfulness." ―Booklist
"A book that is in many ways is an ode to the sentence; from the muscle of a single line to the power that comes with accrual. An immersive and hugely entertaining read." ―Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations
"Alphabetical Diaries is a testament to Heti's artistic power. She gently leads the reader into new dimensions of language previously undiscovered. Beautiful and uncompromising." ―Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour
This information about Alphabetical Diaries was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York deemed one of the "New Classics" of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the "New Vanguard" by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto.
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