“Heti is one of the most interesting novelists working today. She is ruthlessly contemporary, by which I mean, she’s not interested in writing a novel as a nostalgic exercise. She’s constantly trying to figure out new places fiction can go, new ways that we’re using language, new ways that our minds are evolving. ... [Alphabetical Diaries] has all the best characteristics of a diary. It feels very intimate, it feels private, it feels charged with all the kinds of questions you could only bring to your diary, and she makes it a separate kind of novel populated with characters that emerge from her own life. Even in Heti’s career, which has been marked by so many kinds of formal innovation, it has a freshness and a surprise all its own.
- Parul Seghal, The New Yorker Radio Hour
"Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti is a future classic. A great concept executed perfectly."
- Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud
“The effect is riveting. Every notion is packed tight. I found reading Alphabetical Diaries to be a profound experience. … Heti has written a small classic; she has shot a lasting arrow into the hide of the memoir form.”
- Dwight Gardner, The New York Times
Audiobook read by the comic genius KATE BERLANT !
Read an excerpt (chapter B) here.
ALPHABETICAL DIARIES is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Knopf Canada, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It can be pre-ordered now. Forthcoming editions in German, Czech, Spanish, Catalan and Italian. TOUR DATES HERE.
An earlier version of the book ran as a series of 10 instalments in the New York Times in early 2022. In 2014, it was excerpted in an even earlier form in n+1.
Read more about the project in an interview with Sheila Heti here.
“Heti’s ingenious work—part of a long and dynamic tradition of writers-keeping-diaries including Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, and Alice Walker, to name a few—exposes many of her fears and preoccupations while exploring timely and timeless questions about art, ambition, identity, love, and relationships… But most revelatory is her curiosity about what might happen if we looked at our diaries—and ourselves—in a new way. How, she seems to be asking, might we see ourselves and what might we learn if we did shift our axis—if we let go of what we thought we knew and considered ourselves in a new light, untethered from our pasts and the narratives we have long been telling ourselves?” - Je Banach, Oprah Daily