The Middle Stories

Part Dorothy Parker, part José Saramago, with shades of George Orwell, Sheila Heti has arrived on Canada's literary scene a fully formed artist. Balancing wisdom and innocence, joy and foreboding, each story in The Middle Stories leads us to surprising places. A frog doles out sage advice to a plumber infatuated with a princess, a boy falls hopelessly in love with a monkey, and a man with a hat keeps apocalyptic thoughts at bay by resolving to follow a plan that he admits he won't stick to. Globe and Mail critic Russell Smith has described Heti's stories as cryptic fairy tales without morals at the end, but really the morals are in the quality of the telling and in the details disclosed along the way. Look where you weren't going to look, think what you wouldn't have thought, Heti seems to say, and meaning itself gains more meaning and more dimensions. Heti's stories are not what you expect, but why did you expect that anyway?

Sheila Heti is the author of the novel, Ticknor (FSG), and the novel-from-life, How Should a Person Be? (Anansi) which is forthcoming in the U.S. from Henry Holt in the summer of 2012. She recently published an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse (McSweeney's McMullens) featuring paintings by Clare Rojas, and a book of philosophy/essays/self-help with Misha Glouberman called The Chairs Are Where the People Go (Faber and Faber). Her work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Vietnamese and Serbian. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, n+1, McSweeney’s, Brick, Geist, Maisonneuve, Bookforum, The Guardian, and other places.