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

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.

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 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.

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...

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 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 Republic.

Salon, The New Republic

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 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 eight others (selected by James Wood).

The New Yorker

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

bombmagazine

I Will Speak Daggers

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 -- 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 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

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