Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer, who lives in Toronto. She has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant (a freedom not always typical of original or avant-garde writers, for whom a Tom McCarthy-like self-solemnity is more the norm). Her first book, “The Middle Stories,” published when she was twenty-four, was a collection of brief postmodern fables, glittering if slight narratives that often proceed as if they were rewriting canonical fairy tales (a plumber and a princess, a girl who keeps a mermaid in a jar, a woman who lives in a shoe, and so on).
Happiness Forever (2025) Adelaide Faith "I was mesmerized by Happiness Forever, and helplessly caught in its spell from the first page ... It's a beautiful book about longing, and the feeling that one is not a self, and being hurt, and the vulnerability of simply being alive, and friendship, and obsession, and therapy. I wanted to pass it on to all my friends."
Let Me Try Again (2024) Matthew Davis "Matthew Davis has a distinct, charming and compelling voice--funny, original, contemporary and clear, with sprinkles of Bret Easton Ellis, Philip Roth, and even Helen DeWitt."
Daughter (2023) Claudia Dey "Controlled, lucid, and elegant. Daughter is also a formally inventive book--while still being deeply accessible--about how much we can know about others, and how well we can know ourselves. Claudia Dey describes feelings and struggles I haven't encountered in other novels. I loved this beautiful book."
The Future Future (2023) Adam Thirlwell "The Future Future weaves together so many different wisps of reality, creating something radically beautiful. Here, we see the celestial and the political sharing the same plane, inventing wondrous new ways of understanding history, friendship and time."
Acts of Service (2022) Lillian Fishman "I was completely absorbed by this radical, daring and bracing novel about a so-cold and yet so-intimate world where safety and pleasure can only be found in the most unlikely and unpredictable of places. It is a book of exciting, provocative complexity, and, for me, it made the human creature feel like something new."
Happy Hour (2021) Marlowe Granados "Marlowe Granados writes with a delicious joy and confidence. She conveys frivolity without being frivolous, and describes the adventures and degradations of the lives of her characters with an intelligent distance and effervescence that is such a pleasure to read."
The Creep (2021) Michael Lapointe "A deep, weird and uncanny tale. I stayed up all night reading and then it gave me nightmares."
How to Pronounce Knife (2020) Souvankham Thammavongsa "Souvankham Thammavongsa writes with deep precision, wide-open spaces, and quiet, cool, emotionally devastating poise. There is not a moment off in these affecting stories."
A Girl's Story (2020) Annie Ernaux "A Girl's Story is a profound and beautiful examination of the impenetrable wall that time erects between the self we are, and the selves we once were. I know of no other book that so vividly illustrates the frustrations and the temptations of that barrier, and our heartache and longing in trying to breach it. Annie Ernaux is one of my favorite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months."
Weather (2020) Jenny Offill "Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like the ashes from the burning world she describes."
The Idiot (2017) (Idiot , book 1) Elif Batuman "Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters. The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique bildungsroman; one more fascinated with what's going on around and outside the bewildered protagonist, than what's going on inside her."
