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☆ Opinion | What Alice Munro Would Never Do
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-15 | by ( Sheila Heti | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It is common to say “I was heartbroken to hear” that so-and-so died, but I really do feel heartbroken having learned about Alice Munro, who died on Monday. She has long been a North Star for many writers and was someone I have always felt guided by. We are very different writers, but I have kept her in mind, daily and for decades, as an example to follow (but failed to follow to the extent that she demonstrated it): that a fiction writer isn’t someone for hire. A fiction writer isn’t someone who can write anything — movies, articles, obits! She isn’t a person in service to the magazines, to the newspapers, to the publishers or even to her audience.

Persons: Alice Munro, isn’t Organizations: Star

When it comes to fiction, humor is serious business. If tragedy appeals to the emotions, wit appeals to the mind. “You have to know where the funny is,” the writer Sheila Heti says, “and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.” Humor is a bulwark against complacency and conformity, mediocrity and predictability. With all this in mind, we’ve put together a list of 22 of the funniest novels written in English since Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961). That book presented a voice that was fresh, liberated, angry and also funny — about something American novels hadn’t been funny about before: war.

Persons: Sheila Heti, we’ve, Joseph Heller’s “, John Yossarian, Bob Dylan Locations: Vietnam

☆ The ABCs of Modern Life, According to Sheila Heti
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-29 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

ALPHABETICAL DIARIES, by Sheila Heti“No one at this point in history knows how to live, so we read biographies and memoirs, hoping to get some clues,” Sheila Heti writes in “Alphabetical Diaries,” her powerful and intimate new book. In “Alphabetical Diaries” Heti comes at this question slant, as Emily Dickinson advised truth tellers to do — so slant that you may feel you are in a ship that has been thrown sideways. The reader of “Alphabetical Diaries” will not be disappointed in this regard. Heti has done the really hard thinking about submission and its opposite. One four-letter word is zealously deployed in this book, and that word is not “love.”

Persons: Sheila Heti “, ” Sheila Heti, “ Don Quixote ”, ” Heti, Emily Dickinson, Rae Armantrout, ”, Christopher Hitchens, Martis Amis, Heti

☆ A Historical Novel That Is Also a Mash-Up of the Centuries
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-17 | by ( Lizzy Harding | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

But for Thirlwell, Celine is more like the chair in the corner of a bedroom where, by some quirk of gravity, everything always ends up. Just because Celine mistrusts language, seeking instead “something which language was pointing to but which escaped it forever”? To read a Thirlwell novel is to be forced to stroke one’s chin. Like Celine, Heti’s protagonist, Mira, communes with what seem to be voices of the universe and falls in love with other women. Then Celine was green too.” Let that sink in.

Persons: Celine, Thirlwell, Celine mistrusts, ”, Sheila Heti’s, Mira, ” Thirlwell Locations: Celine

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