in praise of Heti's The Middle Stories :

"Sheila Heti has skin like buttermilk and once acted in a Barbie commercial. She looks like Mary Astor and dresses like Zelda Fitzgerald: she is all gravel and poise, her eyes take everything in. The Middle Stories reminds me of her, in its enormous delicacy, ersatz beauty, and utterly unique place in Canadian literature where it hovers, like spun candy, above a fairground littered with peanut shells and other common trash. In larger terms, the book is of a piece with Donald Barthelme, Angela Carter, and Anne Sexton's attempts to contemporize the fantastical, each author asserting, like Mattel's sublime doll, that "we can do anything." The assertion is accurate, the work as modern as flying backward through time. "
—Lynn Crosbie is the author of six books of poetry and fiction. She is also an editor and journalist. Crosbie teaches at the University of Toronto, where she received her Ph.D in English.

her website.