Aurelie Sheehan

Once into the Night is a collection of 57 brief stories, a fictional autobiography made of assumed identities and what-ifs. Here, the inner life is granted pride of place, with truths found in misremembered childhood notebooks, invisible tattoos, and the love life of icemen. Radical in its conception of story, this collection is also welcoming and relatable. Once into the Night blurs the line between fiction, poetry, and essay, as it reconceives contemporary autofiction in its own witty, poignant vernacular. (Fiction Collective 2, February 19, 2019)

 

"Aurelie Sheehan must have gotten her poetic prose license at an elusive shop of glittering perceptions. Her enchantingly quirky, surprise-a-millisecond chapters are fabulous—I wished to go Two, Three, Many more times into the Night, but, alas, these original micro-stories of fables, foibles, and family ended quickly. Please pick them up where I left off, wishing to read them again. How did she do it? Aurelie Sheehan made Oscar Wilde wake Calvino with a start and a glass of bubbly—not in her book, but no kidding, Once into the Night propelled me with its witty, associative voice into a cosmos of magic and memory that I haven't experienced since those guys woke me with a start and a glass of . . ."
—Jane Miller, author of Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions

 

"Aurelie Sheehan writes eerie legends, intimate stories, and beguiling personal confessions that chase after the bottomless mystery inside our everyday lives. These are fictions stamped with truth, or they are true accounts suffused with the clear magic of fiction, crafted by a writer who is a gifted and lyrical seer, shrewdly attuned to what is most worth calling out from our complicated and contested reality."
—Ben Marcus, author of Notes from the Fog

"With a casual and wounding intelligence presiding over every story, Once into the Night feels like a seance of emotions that you're sometimes embarrassed to be feeling, sometimes can't wait to feel again, and sometimes feel relieved to know that you can."

—John D'Agata, author of About a Mountain

Linked stories set in recession-era Tucson, Arizona. Inspired by figures from Greek mythology, this collection is a portrait of a city as reflected by its characters and their fights and loves and brands of crazy. (University of Arizona Press 2014)

Jewelry Box is a collection of intimate histories, concentrated and impressionistic renderings of the life that surrounds us, just under the surface. Grand scale history reveals one reality, but in Sheehan’s book, microcosms are also drenched in the past—in histories. Here stories blossom out from objects and concepts, some of them mundane at first glance: a tube of mascara, a cat’s tail, mushroom paté. Straddling memoir and fiction, the collection’s fifty-eight short works (some as brief as a paragraph, others concentrated in a few pages) explore the nuances of sexuality, motherhood, love, and ambition. As a whole, this book comprises a portrait of a writer reasserting what it means to know a life and tell a story. (BOA Editions, Ltd. 2013)

This novel chronicles the friendship of two thirteen-year-old girls in Weston, Connecticut in the 1970s. Negotiating uneasy terrain—including New Age shamanism, scoliosis, and faith healing—Alison and Kate plunge into their imaginative lives and the balm of horse riding, even as their families interact in increasingly dangerous ways. It soon becomes clear that both girls may not survive the weight of personal history, despite the magic and strength of their friendship and the stories they create together.
(Viking 2006)

Winona Bartlett, a secretary at a New York City law firm, longs to be more than a “non-filmmaking filmmaker,” but instead she keeps saying yes to other people--her boss, who has persnickety ideas about coffee; her boyfriends, whom she doesn’t quite love after all; and her sister, who keeps asking for favors. Then Sandy Spires, a formidable, beautiful, and blind lawyer comes to work at the firm and challenges Winona to take a stand for a change. In love and work, high jinks ensue. (Penguin 2004)

The characters in Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant are often struggling at the edges of polite society--a prostitute, a fortuneteller, a waitress, a widow--and the stories are likewise told with a playful rebelliousness against traditional structure. In the title story, a woman yearns to be like Jack Kerouac, yet is held back by a litany of rules teaching her to be more of a pansy. In “Look at the Moon,” a semi-Catholic, totally bored receptionist hooks up with a flamboyant stranger and winds up on a life-altering road trip. (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994 and 2001)