The central conceit of The Great Big Book of Guys is simple. In chapters with such titles as “Amigos,” “Bad Boys,” and “Codgers,” noted playwright and CBC broadcaster Erika Ritter uses each letter of ...

The book is made up of Heti’s frank, funny, filthy and casually philosophical diaries, 10 years of them. She has pared them down and arranged the sentences in order from A to Z, so that a ...

To match this ideal, Shields’s book itself comprised 26 sections arranged alphabetically, containing fragments, quotations, and reflections, many of them from other writers.