Description
About Sheila Heti
About Alphabetical Diaries
Sheila Heti collected a millions words from a decade’s worth of journals, put them in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She spent the next ten years cutting and refining, and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.
‘Heti’s books aim to be vessels for the transformation of reader and writer. She has spoken of writing a book that would be like a Richard Serra sculpture, which a reader might walk through in the same way that the writer has undergone its creation, not knowing exactly where it is heading or how it will end… Though the formal challenges vary, Heti is always pressing at the membrane between life and art, beauty and ugliness’
— Parul Sehgal, New Yorker
‘Sheila Heti keeps transforming my idea of writing. Her Alphabetical Diaries isn’t just dirty and funny and poignant; it reproposes everything you thought about a self and the way time passes.’
— Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future
‘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
‘A book that is in many ways is an ode to the sentence; from the muscle of single line to the power that comes with accrual. An immersive and hugely entertaining read.’
— Sinéad Gleeson author of Constellations
‘I am drawn to Sheila Heti’s writing like a moth to a flame and Alphabetical Diaries is amongst the most affecting, exquisite books I’ve ever encountered. It is, simply put, utterly and startlingly good. Heti writes so creaturely, so bodily, that it feels like a whole new genre is being formed as we read.’
— Kerri ní Dochartaigh author of Cacophony of Bone
‘I’ll read anything Sheila Heti writes.’
— Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts
‘Like Iris Murdoch’s novels, Heti’s are philosophically intense, although Heti’s work is pared down where Murdoch’s was Rabelaisian.’
— Dwight Garner, New York Times
‘By fragmenting and then formulaically rearranging these personal records, Heti has reinvigorated them as more than a journal, brought them to life as a fascinating book which highlights the consistency and inconsistencies of us all, how our minds flit from subject to subject to elsewhere. It is a warm-hearted, individual, exploration of what it is to be alive, what it is to be human.’
— Rupert Loydall, Tears in the Fence
About Polly Barton
Polly Barton is a Japanese literary translator. Her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki. She won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Fifty Sounds. She’s also the author of the landmark non-fiction investigative interview collection Porn: An Oral History. She lives in Bristol.