Sheila Heti - "Pure Colour"

Friday, February 18, 2022 - 8:00pm - 9:00pm
Event Presenter/Author: 
Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti will discuss her novel Pure Colour. She will be in conversation with Elif Batuman.

Presented in partnership with Green Apple Books, Elliott Bay Book Company, A Room of One's Own, and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Virtual event. Purchase your tickets HERE. 

About the book: Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.

In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.

Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

About the author: Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure ColourMotherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the “New Classics” of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the “New Vanguard” by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto and Kawartha Lakes, Ontario. Author photo by Malcolm Brown.

About the interlocutor: Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. Her second novel, Either/Or, will publish in May. Author photo by Valentyn Kuzan.

Event Location: 
Virtual