Sheila Heti

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).