Sheila Heti

From the author of How Should a Person Be? ("one of the most talked-about books of the year"--Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti's intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how--and for whom--to live.

In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery-a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to the present moment: a story of growing up, of defining yourself, and of the rapidly changing world of gender politics. Fresh from university, eager to escape a dead-end job and launch a career as a writer, she navigates the treacherous waters of a world where, even in the liberal and feminist media, transgender identities go unacknowledged, misunderstood or worse. Revealing, honest,humorous, and self-deprecating, Trans includes an epilogue with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 Sheila's twenties were going to plan. 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.

Chosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times "Funny...odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable...unlike any novel I can think of."--David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review "Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral, and sexy."--San Francisco Chronicle Named a Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Flavorpill, The New Republic, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post A raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium--a compulsive read that's like "spending a day with your new best friend" (Bookforum) By turns loved and reviled upon its U. S. publication, Sheila Heti's "breakthrough novel" (Chris Kraus, Los Angeles Review of Books) is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman's heart and mind. Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part vivid exploration of the artistic and sexual impulse, How Should a Person Be? earned Heti comparisons to Henry Miller, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, and Flaubert, while shocking and exciting readers with its raw, urgent depiction of female friendship and of the shape of our lives now. Irreverent, brilliant, and completely original, Heti challenges, questions, frustrates, and entertains in equal measure. With urgency and candor she asks: What is the most noble way to love? What kind of person should you be?

Why shouldn't neighbourhoods change? Why is wearing a suit a good way to quit smoking? Why do people think that if you do one thing you're against something else? Is monogamy a trick? Why should making the city more fun for you and your friends be a super-noble political goal? Why does a computer last only three years? How often should you see your parents? What do spam filters tell us about the world? How should we behave at parties? Is marriage getting easier? What do gyms say about the way we live now? Why do we sometimes feel like frauds? In short, pithy chapters ('Gentrification', 'People's Protective Bubbles Are OK', 'A Mind Is Not a Terrible Thing to Measure'), Misha Glouberman tells us what he has learned about life, tackling the most trivial of questions alongside the more important ones and revealing that they have more in common than you might think. From thoughts about conflict resolution in the Middle East to observations about loud music in rowdy neighbourhoods, from questions on the function of spam filters to ideas on how to edit our own lives, "The Chairs Are Where the People Go" is an invigorating, entertaining handbook for the times we live in.