Alphabetical Diaries
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Critics Top Book of the Year • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker • Literary Hub • Electric Literature • The Los Angeles Times • The New Statesman
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With previous books like Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, author Sheila Heti mined the minutiae of her life to assemble jazzy, meandering fiction that reflects the way our minds work—roaming free, but also rehashing the same questions over and over again. In Alphabetical Diaries, Heti takes a different tack, organizing a decade’s worth of sentences from her journals alphabetically into something like a long prose poem divided into chapters for each letter. Yes, it’s a gimmick, but somehow this short, strange book ignites the imagination, inviting us to fill in the blanks and paint our own pictures of the people, conversations, and events that inspired Heti’s musings. We’ll be dipping into it again and again.
