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How Should a Person Be?
Sheila Heti
€ 14.99
€ 11.51
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Description for How Should a Person Be?
Paperback. Sheila's twenties were going to plan. She got married. She hosted parties. A theatre asked her to write a play. Then she realised that she didn't know how to write a play. That her favourite part of the party was cleaning up after the party. And that her marriage made her feel like she was banging into a brick wall. Num Pages: 320 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 199 x 130 x 20. Weight in Grams: 228.
'It made me want to write' Sally Rooney
'A seriously strange but funny plunge into the quest for authenticity' Margaret Atwood
'A classic in the making' Stylist
Sheila's twenties were going to plan.
She got married.
She hosted parties.
A theatre asked her to write a play.
Then she realised that she didn't know how to write a play.
That her favourite part of the party was cleaning up after the party.
And that her marriage made her feel like she was banging into a brick wall.
So Sheila abandons her marriage and her play, befriends Margaux, a free and untortured painter, and begins sleeping with the dominating Israel, who's a genius at sex but not at art. She throws herself into recording them and everyone around her, investigating how they live, desperate to know, as she wanders, How Should a Person Be?
Using transcripts, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction, Heti crafts an exciting, courageous, and mordantly funny tour through one woman's heart and mind.
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2014
Publisher
Vintage Publishing
Condition
New
Number of Pages
320
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9780099583561
SKU
9780099583561
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
Ref
99-2
About Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the 'New Classics' of the twenty-first century and which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her novels have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto and Kawartha Lakes, Ontario.
Reviews for How Should a Person Be?
Witty, unusual, raw...a powerful read...a classic in the making
Stylist
Original...hilarious... Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form
Marie Claire
Amazing
Lena Dunham A shamelessly funny read
Grazia
Funny, bawdy and fiercely original
Easy Living
A sharp and unsentimental chronicle of what it is like to be a 20-something now
Economist
A book that risks everything... Complex, artfully messy, and hilarious
Miranda July Uniquely honest, funny and clever... Heti is superbly truthful and shockingly funny - no words were minced in the making of this strange, brilliant book
Kate Saunders
The Times
Joyously self-conscious…profoundly ironic…or, perhaps more accurately, it is a production profoundly concerned with how to live authentically in a world saturated by irony
Olivia Laing
New Statesman
Utterly beguiling: blunt, charming, funny, and smart. Heti subtly weaves together ideas about sex, femininity and artistic ambition. Reading this genre-defying book was pure pleasure
David Shields, author of Reality Hunger Engaging
Guardian
Genuinely laugh out loud
Daily Mail
Utterly now
Claire Allfree
Metro
Ambitious, assured and ruthlessly controlled…exhilarating
Richard Beck
Prospect
How Should a Person Be? is a question to be revisited by the author herself, or another writer, or many other writers – but it’s also the question novels were invented to respond to… Sheila makes it ugly to clear a space: for novels to be less fictional, for women to dream of being geniuses, for a way of being 'honest and transparent and give away nothing'
Joanna Briggs
London Review of Books
A timely, gloriously messy, openhearted, clever and beautiful new thing
Dazed & Confused
An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be? is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide
Grazia
A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring exposition…fascinating
Sinead Gleeson
Irish Times
Provocative, funny and original
Hannah Rosefield
Literary Review
A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept one’s own ugliness
Richard Godwin
Evening Standard
An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds
Lidija Haas
Times Literary Supplement
A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture
Natasha Lehrer
Jewish Chronicle
[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant…How Should a Person Be? offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western City…This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being
James Wood, New Yorker
Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of
New York Times
Playful, funny... absolutely true
The Paris Review
Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations
Eve Commander
Big Issue in the North
Amusing and original
Mail on Sunday
Stylist
Original...hilarious... Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form
Marie Claire
Amazing
Lena Dunham A shamelessly funny read
Grazia
Funny, bawdy and fiercely original
Easy Living
A sharp and unsentimental chronicle of what it is like to be a 20-something now
Economist
A book that risks everything... Complex, artfully messy, and hilarious
Miranda July Uniquely honest, funny and clever... Heti is superbly truthful and shockingly funny - no words were minced in the making of this strange, brilliant book
Kate Saunders
The Times
Joyously self-conscious…profoundly ironic…or, perhaps more accurately, it is a production profoundly concerned with how to live authentically in a world saturated by irony
Olivia Laing
New Statesman
Utterly beguiling: blunt, charming, funny, and smart. Heti subtly weaves together ideas about sex, femininity and artistic ambition. Reading this genre-defying book was pure pleasure
David Shields, author of Reality Hunger Engaging
Guardian
Genuinely laugh out loud
Daily Mail
Utterly now
Claire Allfree
Metro
Ambitious, assured and ruthlessly controlled…exhilarating
Richard Beck
Prospect
How Should a Person Be? is a question to be revisited by the author herself, or another writer, or many other writers – but it’s also the question novels were invented to respond to… Sheila makes it ugly to clear a space: for novels to be less fictional, for women to dream of being geniuses, for a way of being 'honest and transparent and give away nothing'
Joanna Briggs
London Review of Books
A timely, gloriously messy, openhearted, clever and beautiful new thing
Dazed & Confused
An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be? is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide
Grazia
A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring exposition…fascinating
Sinead Gleeson
Irish Times
Provocative, funny and original
Hannah Rosefield
Literary Review
A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept one’s own ugliness
Richard Godwin
Evening Standard
An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds
Lidija Haas
Times Literary Supplement
A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture
Natasha Lehrer
Jewish Chronicle
[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant…How Should a Person Be? offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western City…This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being
James Wood, New Yorker
Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of
New York Times
Playful, funny... absolutely true
The Paris Review
Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations
Eve Commander
Big Issue in the North
Amusing and original
Mail on Sunday