How Should a Person Be?

Read Every Page of Brillantine, Sheila Heti’s Lost 90s...

sheilaheti — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:20:06 -0400

Read Every Page of Brillantine, Sheila Heti’s Lost 90s Zine at nymag.com

sheilaheti: The American paperback comes out in June! I really love this gentle new cover. And a...

sheilaheti — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:54:19 -0400

The American paperback comes out in June! I really love this gentle new cover.

And a question for you: Should I be on the Times 100 list? Vote here.

believermag: Tomorrow (Saturday 9th) is the first U.S....

sheilaheti — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:15:12 -0500

believermag:

Tomorrow (Saturday 9th) is the first U.S. screening of painter and filmmaker Margaux Wiliamson’s film Teenager Hamlet. This “constructed reality” movie is about the tension between the Hamlets of the world (who worry about what’s a worthy action to take in life) and the Ophelias (who have faith in the redemptive power of beauty).

It is the companion piece to Believer editor Sheila Heti’s book, How Should a Person Be? Both the book and the movie were created between 2006 and 2012 and feature many of the same people.

Please come! $9 suggested donation. 7:30 PM at UnionDocs (322 Union Ave., Williamsburg, Brooklyn).

"Sheila Heti was named one of the 3 Canadians who made a “profoundly significant” impact..."

sheilaheti — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:42:31 -0500

“Sheila Heti was named one of the 3 Canadians who made a “profoundly significant” impact this year, alongside parliamentary watchdog Kevin Page, and Pierre Savard, one of the scientists whose work led to the confirmation of the Higgs Boson. The Toronto Star wrote, “While some critics dismissed the book’s moral grappling as frivolous or shallow, others saw the backlash as a sign of a lingering discomfort with fiction that focuses on relationships among women, especially intellectually ambitious ones.””

- The Toronto Star

"Apple’s iTunes chose How Should a Person Be? as one of their Top 10 Favorite Books of 2012."

sheilaheti — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 16:04:00 -0500

“Apple’s iTunes chose How Should a Person Be? as one of their Top 10 Favorite Books of 2012.”

"I read Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? on the bus to Vancouver, B.C. Somewhere around Olympia..."

sheilaheti — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:54:15 -0500

“

I read Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? on the bus to Vancouver, B.C. Somewhere around Olympia I realized that if I couldn’t pace myself I’d finish it before the border. Fuck it, I yelled at the Tacoma Dome, and opened the book back up. It turned me on, it turned me off, it challenged everything I thought I knew about women and nonfiction.

—Michael Heald, author of Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension

”

- Wilamette Week (Portland), The Best Thing I Read in 2012

Over at The New Republic...

sheilaheti — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:29:03 -0500

Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? is certainly one of the more original books I’ve read, though not in the way I at first expected. It is cast as a nonfiction novel: it is narrated by a writer named Sheila, and it’s about her friends, who all have the same names as several real-life friends of hers. It is, in her words, a “novel from life.” But it turns out that there are pretty obvious artistic licenses taken—for example, a rough, brooding sex partner is named “Israel,” which gives rise to some too-good-to-be true scenarios and sentences, suggesting at least some degree of fabrication. But Heti’s novel instructs its readers to assume documentary truth. The result of this fact-fiction tension was that How Should a Person Be?—which would more accurately have been titled How Should an Artist Be?—made me think about the sacrifices that go into making art.

– Marc Tracy, Staff Writer

Author Alix Ohlin chooses How Should a Person Be? as her...

sheilaheti — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:28:07 -0500

Author Alix Ohlin chooses How Should a Person Be? as her favourite book of the year over at Salon…

"Salon choses How Should a Person Be? as one of its 10 Best Books of 2012, and so does The New..."

sheilaheti — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:27:01 -0500

“Salon choses How Should a Person Be? as one of its 10 Best Books of 2012, and so does The New Republic.”

- Salon, The New Republic

"How Should a Person Be? was included in the New York Observer’s “Year in Books” for 2012"

sheilaheti — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:15:01 -0500

“How Should a Person Be? was included in the New York Observer’s “Year in Books” for 2012”

- The New York Observer

"Christian Lorentzen, an editor at the London Review of Books and critic there, says How Should a..."

sheilaheti — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 10:01:09 -0500

“Christian Lorentzen, an editor at the London Review of Books and critic there, says How Should a Person Be? will be “the litty thing the Obama administration era is remembered for,” and “a major blow in a series of what-it’s-like-to-be-me novels.””

- The Millions: A Year in Reading

"The New Yorker chooses its Books of the Year… How Should a Person Be? is there, alongside..."

sheilaheti — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 06:27:51 -0500

“The New Yorker chooses its Books of the Year… How Should a Person Be? is there, alongside eight others (selected by James Wood).”

- The New Yorker

"Forget the Girls comparisons. With its audacious honesty, vividly contemporary style, deep..."

sheilaheti — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:45:50 -0500

“Forget the Girls comparisons. With its audacious honesty, vividly contemporary style, deep understanding of intellectual ambition, and thrilling unfairness to the opposite sex, reading How Should a Person Be? as a young, heterosexual, Jewish woman in 2012 felt much the way I imagine reading Philip Roth felt to young, heterosexual, Jewish men in the 1970s. But I’d like to think that, as with Roth, you don’t have to fit into any of those categories to appreciate it.”

- Flavorpill’s Best Books, 2012

I Will Speak Daggers

sheilaheti — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:39:57 -0500

bombmagazine:

Margaux Williamson on her performance piece How to Act in Real Life, her film Teenager Hamlet, and being a character in Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?

"It’s one of those books you read that makes you say “I could write that.” Not because it’s easy..."

sheilaheti — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:47:04 -0500

“It’s one of those books you read that makes you say “I could write that.” Not because it’s easy — it’s not. It took her six years. It just that it fills you with such energy that before you’ve put it down you’ve reached for your own pen.”

- Nextness, Books We Loved in 2012

"This same woman—who writes about getting fired from a beauty salon and drinking for eight hours..."

sheilaheti — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:44:03 -0500

“This same woman—who writes about getting fired from a beauty salon and drinking for eight hours straight—is also the author of four books, and has written for n+1, The Guardian, and The New York Times. And these intense differences between personal and professional life aren’t irreconcilable, paradoxical, or abnormal—they’re just not talked about, or, really, separate at all.”

- Chicago Maroon, Top 5 Fiction of the Year

"[Heti] exposes and explores the complicated landscape of female affection without eroticizing it...."

sheilaheti — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:41:00 -0500

“[Heti] exposes and explores the complicated landscape of female affection without eroticizing it. She brings light to the kind of jealousy, possessiveness, and mutual obsession and adoration between her and her best friend in a way that is true and, yes, beautiful. It calls into question the way female friendship can be misrepresented in media portrayals. Sheila and Margaux’s codependency is seen as an important aspect of the women’s development as people and artists and thinkers and makers. They love each other in a deep way that, although it is not sexual, is every bit as essential, if not more, than their relationships with their lovers.”

- Propellor, review by Genevieve Hudson

"Maybe there’s just a “type” of person who’s primed to be spun around by Sheila Heti’s novel How..."

sheilaheti — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 11:15:00 -0500

““Maybe there’s just a “type” of person who’s primed to be spun around by Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be?—someone for whom that question already seems open and vexed and not a distraction from simply being. I appear to be very much of that type.” - Nitsuh Abebe, music critic at New York Magazine”

- NYMag’s “Vulture” blog’s roundup of “Cultural Events of 2012.”

"How Should a Person Be? is chosen as one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2012!"

sheilaheti — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:00:23 -0500

“How Should a Person Be? is chosen as one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2012!”

- The New York Times

"The novel’s biggest virtue is Sheila’s messy complexity that Ms Heti never stops short of revelling..."

sheilaheti — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 19:55:25 -0500

“The novel’s biggest virtue is Sheila’s messy complexity that Ms Heti never stops short of revelling in. … This is that rare novel: an airport read, a post-coital read, a beach read, a binge read. While trying hard not to sound like Virginia Woolf, I would wager that this is how a novel should be.”

- Business Standard (India)