“Becoming Jane Eyre” in Turkish published by Kirmizi Kedi Yayinevi
Latest review of Open Secrets
The Best Books Vogue Editors Read in 2020
Recently published:
STORIES
- “The Teacher” in Salmagundi ( Fall 2019-winter 2020)
- “Dostoevsky” in The Antioch Review ( Spring 2019)
- “Cracks” in Paris Review Redux (August 27th 2019)
- ” The Darling” in Ellery Queen ( May/ June 2019)
- “Miss Martin” in Cutting Edge New Stories of Crime by Women Writers edited by Joyce Carol Oates
- “Displaced” in Fiction volume 64
- Miss Martin”which is in The Best American Mystery Stories of 2020 ( Houghton Mifflin).
- “Of Arms and Women I sing” Ellery Queens
- New essay on Freud as a great writer in the five case histories in “On the Couch” published by Princeton Press coming in 2023
BLOGS
- “The Windmills of our Minds” on reading during the Pandemic in the American
- “The Uses of Water in Fiction” for Ellery Queen’s blog 21st October 2021
TRANSLATIONS
- “Dreaming for Freud” sold to the Serbians.
RECENT REVIEWS
- Of “Dreaming for Freud” in The Wall Street Journal ( April 2019 by Lisa Gornick)
- Of “Cracks” in The Wall Street Journal ( August 2nd by W.H. Cross)
- Of “One Girl” in the Antioch Review
Sheila Kohler is now blogging for Psychology Today at: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dreaming-freud
Reviews for “ONCE WE WERE SISTERS”
“Young Sheila Kohler abandons the time-warp of 1950s South Africa and heads for Europe on a voyage of self-discovery. Her quest to find out what it is that she desires—a quest that will last decades and is recounted with the seriousness it deserves, lightened with touches of dry comedy—ends in the discovery that she is and has always been a writer. The most striking parts of this rich and poignant memoir—rich above all in sensual experience—reflect on the necessary cruelty of the writer’s art, sacrificing the truth of the world to the truth of fiction.” —J.M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“Throughout her literary career, Sheila Kohler has obsessively tried to find closure and justice for her sister’s untimely death and, finally, in this memoir she has succeeded in coming to terms with the tragedy by movingly recalling their childhood together and expressing her love for her sister.” —Lily Tuck, National Book Award-winning author of The Double Life of Liliane
“For unto whom much is given, of him shall be much required: this Biblical verse takes on a tragic ring as this memoir of a privileged childhood ends in murder. Sheila Kohler has put together this heartfelt, suspenseful confession with a lifetime’s worth of skill and an abundance of inborn genius.” —Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story
“Sheila Kohler has written a beautiful and disturbing memoir of a beloved sister who died at the age of thirty-nine in circumstances that strongly suggest murder. Like all of Sheila Kohler’s prose work, Once We Were Sisters reveals its story by degrees, amid a richly sensuous milieu of South African white privilege and repression. It is a tragic tale, with echoes of cultural sexism and misogyny, yet a triumphant story of a young woman’s liberation from this culture and her emergence as a writer. Highly recommended.” —Joyce Carol Oates, National Book Award-winning author of Them
“Sheila Kohler’s writing is visually potent, viscerally compelling, and intensely personal. In Once We Were Sisters she conjures a lost world of privilege, violence, and repression that has chilling parallels in contemporary life.” —Rebecca Miller, author of Personal Velocity
“This lean memoir cuts straight to the heart of what it is to love—and lose—a sister. Kohler sidesteps nothing; her private rage, regret, heartbreak, and revelation mingle unforgettably with the public shame of apartheid. Once We Were Sisters is an exquisite and devastating book.” —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ordinary Light
“To write a first-rate memoir is to encounter a mystery. In Sheila Kohler’s brilliantly intelligent, beautifully written, sensually detailed, sexy, exquisitely restrained and shocking memoir, there are several mysteries: Why do we act the way we do? Why are we passive when we should be active, and vice versa? What does it take for a young woman to find out who she is? What griefs, what losses must attend that discovery? How to account for the cruelty and self-indulgence of men, or the willed blindness and guilt of women? ‘What is it I have done or failed to do?’ the memoirist keeps asking here, and her responses are unfailingly, stringently honest.” —Phillip Lopate, author of Being With Children