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.”

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