REVIEWS OF HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?

 

The New York Times: "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." ...more

The Observer: "Why won't America Publish Sheila Heti's Second Novel?" (December 2010) ...more

The London Review of Books: "Sheila makes [the novel] 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.’" ...more

The Economist: "A sharp and unsentimental chronicle of what it's like to be a 20-something now... It's easy to see why a book on the anxiety of celebrity has turned the author into one herself." ...PDF

Prospect: "It's exhilarating to see Heti embrace her contemporaries, fucking idiots though they may be, with such anger, affection and intelligence." ...PDF

The New Republic: It "offers a devastating account of the traps women fall into nonetheless, namely allowing men to act as their sole mentors and sources of approval. It is, in a very new way, the most thoughtfully feminist novel I have read in years—because of its flaws, and not despite them." ...more

The New Republic: "The New Essayists or the Decline of the Form?" by Adam Kirsch: "The literary cunning and intelligence that Heti employs ... have been underestimated by many of the book’s critics. Where the new essayists fictionalize reality to create an image, Heti uses ostensibly real people and even documents—e-mails, taped conversations—to underpin the classic fictional project of the Bildungsroman, the creation of a genuine self." ...more

Thought Catalog: "Sheila Heti's Rocket Fuel for the Fearful Artist" ...more

The New Yorker: "She has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant (a freedom not always typical of original or avant-garde writers)." - James Wood ...PDF

Slate: "Why smart, serious men have misunderstood Sheila Heti's new book" ...more

Slate audio book club discussion of the book, with David Haglund, Dan Kois and Meghan O'Rourke ...more

The Toronto Star: "While some critics dismissed the book's moral grapplings as frivilous or shallow, others saw the backlash as a sign of lingering discomfort with fiction that focuses on relationships among women, especially intellectually ambitious ones." ...more

Bookforum: "Heti truly has a startling voice all her own, and a fresh take on fiction and autobiography’s overlap." ...more

The Paris Review: An article about the difference between the two published versions of the book. ...more

The Guardian: "The project of this novel, it seems, is not to be beautiful, or even liked, but to challenge the idea that art should have these effects. Art, it suggests, can be humiliating, banal, low." ...more

Californica (discussion): "I’d love to hear more about what you thought was so unique about Heti’s writing. For me, it’s not just that she’s walking the line between fiction and nonfiction, which writers do all the time. It’s the wavy, vernacular path she carves between documenting and fictionalizing her own experience." ...more