Archives par étiquette : Sheila Heti

THE ST. ALWYNN GIRLS AT SEA de Sheila Heti

From “one of the freshest, funniest and most ingenious humans writing today [and] one of our best living authors” (The Washington Post) comes a deeply delightful seafaring adventure and a brilliant group portrait of female adolescence.

THE ST. ALWYNN GIRLS AT SEA
by Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Photo credit: Luis Mora

To escape the dangers of wartime bombings, the girls of St. Alwynn’s have been evacuated by their headmistress to a ship on the high seas. Yet instead of being safe, they find themselves plunged into a different kind of chaos. Trapped in a floating pressure cooker of teenage anguish and rivalry, their isolation is penetrated by just one thing: the weekly arrival of the mail bag, bearing letters from a distant boys’ ship.

Through the perspectives of the passionate Dani, the high-minded Lorraine, the sensitive Flora, and the beautiful Yvonne, THE ST. ALWYNN GIRLS AT SEA creates a dramatic and vivid mini-society. But as their ship sails onward, westward, or perhaps just around in circles, the girls find themselves in ever more peril. Will they never reach home? Is their headmistress okay? And what if they’ve completely misunderstood each other―and themselves?

Hilarious, moving, and taking on some of the biggest questions of life, THE ST. ALWYNN GIRLS AT SEA delivers the absorbing and wondrous pleasures of childhood reading while inventing an entirely new category of narrative pleasure, anchored by the psychological incisiveness Sheila Heti is known for. It is as though she has gone back in time and returned to the present with a lost modern classic in hand.

Sheila Heti is the author of eight books, including the critically acclaimed How Should a Person Be? and the New York Times Bestseller, Women in Clothes (edited with Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton). She is the former interviews editor at The Believer magazine, and has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, n+1, The London Review of Books, and more. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. She lives in Toronto.

THE ALPHABETICAL DIARIES de Sheila Heti

A habitual diarist radically compresses and reorders ten years of life, asking not how a person should be, but how a person is.

THE ALPHABETICAL DIARIES
by Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Spring 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

“A little more than 10 years ago, I began looking back at the diaries I had kept over the previous decade. I wondered if I’d changed. So I loaded all 500,000 words of my journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically. Perhaps this would help me identify patterns and repetitions. How many times had I written, I hate him, for example? With the sentences untethered from narrative, I started to see the self in a new way: as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. As I returned to the project over the years, it grew into something more novelistic. I blurred the characters and cut thousands of sentences, to introduce some rhythm and beauty. When I was asked about a work of fiction that could be serialized, I thought of these diaries: The self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction, and what is a more fundamental mode of serialization than the alphabet? After some editing, here is the result.” —Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be?, which New York Magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st 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-one languages.

PURE COLOUR de Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti’s most formally adventurous novel yet—a book about death and rebirth, about loss and its hidden gifts, about God, middle age, and friendship, set “in the world behind this world.”

PURE COLOUR
by Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2022
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

The world is failing to remain a world. It is coming apart. The ice cubes are melting. Species are dying. People, too―of different things. But what if this world is just a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed? In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal―to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.
PURE COLOUR is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be?, which New York Magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st 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-one languages.