ALPHABETICAL DIARIES, Sheila Heti - Fitzcarraldo Editions

Sheila Heti collected half a million 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

"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

"A book that is in many way 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

"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

Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the New Classics of the twenty-first century. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Alphabetical Diaries is her first book with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024
Design by Ray O'Meara
English, 163 pages
French paperback with flaps, 168 pages
ISBN: 978-1-80427-077-6