"I think Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti is a future classic. A great concept executed perfectly." - Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud
“Heti has written a small classic.” - 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