In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice.

Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Colour (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist’s temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.”

if you enjoyed this Novel Dialogue crossover conversation, you might also check out earlier ones with Joshua Cohen, Charles Yu, Caryl Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner and Orhan Pamuk.

Mentioned in this Episode:

By Sheila Heti:

Pure Colour

How Should a Person Be?

Alphabetical Diaries

Ticknor

We Need a Horse (children’s book)

The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman)

Also mentioned:

Oulipo Group

Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard

Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star)

Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy

Willa Cather , The Professor’s House (overlap of reality and recollection): “When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage–behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.”)

William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble.

Listen and Read:

Transcript: 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff

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