How Should a Person Be?

Fülszöveg

what is the most noble way to love? What kind of person should you be?
The rare book that philosophizes as it entertains, Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman's heart and mind, an irresistible torn-from-life novel about friendship, art, sex, and love. Hailed as "an unforgettable book" by the National Post in Heti's native Canada, where a version of the novel was first published in 2010, How Should a Person Be? lets us into a world as emotionally raw and beautifully observed as it is salacious and fun—a heady, titillating experience like "spending a day with your new best friend" {Bookforum).
Fresh from a failed marriage and unable to complete a feminist play she's been commissioned to write, twenty-something artist and playwright Sheila is floundering. How can she write about women when everything she's learned about herself comes from the men she's known who "wanted to teach her... Tovább

Fülszöveg

what is the most noble way to love? What kind of person should you be?
The rare book that philosophizes as it entertains, Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman's heart and mind, an irresistible torn-from-life novel about friendship, art, sex, and love. Hailed as "an unforgettable book" by the National Post in Heti's native Canada, where a version of the novel was first published in 2010, How Should a Person Be? lets us into a world as emotionally raw and beautifully observed as it is salacious and fun—a heady, titillating experience like "spending a day with your new best friend" {Bookforum).
Fresh from a failed marriage and unable to complete a feminist play she's been commissioned to write, twenty-something artist and playwright Sheila is floundering. How can she write about women when everything she's learned about herself comes from the men she's known who "wanted to teach her something".''
So when Margaux, a talented painter, and Israel, a sexy and depraved artist, come into her life, Sheila plunges them into a life experiment, tape-recording their conversations and treating them as specimens in an investigation. Perhaps through close—sometimes too close—observation of her new friend and new lover, she might regain her footing in art and life. From Toronto to Miami, New York, and back, Sheila's investigations take her—and us—into ever more fertile and dangerous territory.
Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part racy confessional, How Should a Person Be? is a fearless exploration into the way we live now by one of the most highly inventive and thoughtful young writers working today.
SHEILA HETI is the author of several books of fiction, including The Middle Stories and Ticknor., and a book of "conversational philosophy" called The Chairs Are Where the People Go, written with Misha Glouberman, which was chosen by The New Yorker as a best book of 2011. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, McSweeney's, n+1, The Guardian, and other places. She works as interviews editor at The Believer magazine and lives in Toronto.
Visit the author's website at www.sheilaheti.net
Jacket design and illustration by Rebecca Seltzer
www.henryholt.com
Henry Holt and Company
175 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10010
Praise for
HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?
"A new kind of book and new kind of person. A book that risks everything—shatters every rule we women try to follow in order to be taken seriously—and thus is nothing less than groundbreaking: in form, sexually, relationally, and as a major literary work. With this complex, artfully messy, and hilarious novel, Heti has done the rare and generous thing of creadng more room for the rest of us. This is how a person should be."
— MIRANDA JULY, author of No One Belongs Here More Than You and It Chooses You
"A seriously strange but funny plunge into the quest for authenticity."
— MARGARET ATWOOD, @MargaretAtwood
"Oh crap. I don't know how to begin talking about Sheila Heti or how good she is. People will say How Should a Person Be? is reminiscent of Patti Smith's Just Kids or Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty and both of these things will be true. But I am still reeling from the originality of this novel. There are passages here so striking, to read them is to be punched in the heart."
—SLOANE CROSLEY, author of How Did You Get This Number
"How Should a Person Be? dares to ask just that: how should a person, a woman, an artist be.'' The book subtly and beautifully weaves together ideas about sex and femininity, and art and artistic ambition. Sheila's voice is charming and compelling, unusually blunt—but also funny and sexy and smart."
— DAVID SHIELDS, author of/?ea//ty Hunger
"The most candid fictionalized memoir ever written I predict Sheila Heti's book will continue to be read for 600 years, not just for its sex (which can be found elsewhere), but as a picture of artistic and literary North America in the first two decades of this century."
— KENNETH GOLDSMITH, poet and author of Uncreative Writing Vissza