How Should A Person Be? By Sheila Heti - Penguin Books Australia

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• Published: 23 February 2023
• ISBN: 9780099583561
• Imprint: Vintage
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 320
• RRP: $22.99

Categories:

• Contemporary fiction
• General & literary fiction

How Should a Person Be?

• Sheila Heti

Formats & editions EBook 24 Jan 2013 Paperback 23 Feb 2023 Buy from… Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape View all retailers

An utterly cool and covetable new look for Sheila Heti's genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium, publishing alongside the paperback of Pure Colour in 2023

'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

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• Published: 23 February 2023
• ISBN: 9780099583561
• Imprint: Vintage
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 320
• RRP: $22.99

Categories:

• Contemporary fiction
• General & literary fiction

About the author

Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti is the author of seven books, including the critically acclaimed How Should a Person Be? and is co-editor of the New York Times bestseller, Women in Clothes. She is the former interviews editor at The Believer magazine, and has been published in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, McSweeney’s, Harper's and n+1. Her work has been translated into adozen languages. She lives in Toronto.

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Also by Sheila Heti

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Praise for How Should a Person Be?

Amazing

Lena Dunham

Funny, bawdy and fiercely original

Easy Living

A shamelessly funny read

Grazia

Original...hilarious... Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form

Marie Claire

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

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

Genuinely laugh out loud

Daily Mail

Utterly now

Claire Allfree, Metro

A sharp and unsentimental chronicle of what it is like to be a 20-something now

Economist

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

Ambitious, assured and ruthlessly controlled…exhilarating

Richard Beck, Prospect

Witty, unusual, raw...a powerful read...a classic in the making

Stylist

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

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

A timely, gloriously messy, openhearted, clever and beautiful new thing

Dazed & Confused

[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

A book that risks everything... Complex, artfully messy, and hilarious

Miranda July

Playful, funny... absolutely true

The Paris Review

Engaging

Scarlett Thomas, Guardian

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

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