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“... At the start of Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam Gordon, a young American in Spain for a year on a fellowship, purportedly to write ‘a long, research-driven poem’ about the Spanish Civil War’s ‘literary legacy’, goes into the Prado and heads for Rogier Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. He has been standing in front of it every morning since he arrived in Madrid, but today he finds a man in his place, facing the painting – or maybe the wall ...”

“... There​ was a time when artists and writers flocked to inexpensive cities to allow themselves the trials of making art over the trials of making a living. In North America today, the main site of literary activity or literary business – which more and more amount to the same thing – is Brooklyn. Yet it’s probably one of the toughest places for a writer to live cheaply and noodle about, wearing rags ...”

“... In 2009 Kate Zambreno went to live in Akron, Ohio, the sort of place you only choose if the situation is desperate. She was there because her husband had been hired to ‘curate and organise a small collection of rare books at the university … the gift of a rubber industrialist’. Friends asked why they’d made this uninspiring move. ‘The economy, you know ...”

“... Last year, I happened to meet the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. I had just read part of Book 1 of My Struggle, his six-volume autobiographical series, and in a scene that imprinted itself on my memory – a scene from his childhood, set on New Year’s Eve before he heads out with his friends – he steps into the family kitchen: I got up, grabbed the orange peel, went into the kitchen, where mum was scrubbing potatoes, opened the cupboard beside her and dropped the peel in the wastebin, watched dad walk across the drive, running a hand through his hair in that characteristic way of his, after which I went upstairs to my room, closed the door behind me, put on a record and lay down on my bed again ...”

“... In​ 1990, when she was 35 years old, Paulina Chiziane became the first woman in Mozambique to publish a novel. She has since published six more books, writing in Portuguese, and is one of Mozambique’s most culturally significant writers. In interviews, Chiziane has explained that she has received a lot of criticism for her books from people who think that the women’s lives she depicts aren’t deserving of attention; that the subject matter of a number of her books – women in love, as it were – is decadent, in a country where there is so much development work to be done ...”

“... by the satisfaction of spotting the shaping hand. I was watching a reality show for the art of it. Sheila Heti’s second novel, How Should a Person Be?, has a lot of the same anxious pleasures. The ‘novel from life’ – a marketing tag, not a manifesto – caused a stir when it was published in the US in June. James Wood reviewed it at length in the ...”

“... Sheila Heti​ writes novels about the burden of freedom. Her characters navigate their lives as if the world were new and traditions obsolete; they can’t trust history, but they don’t trust intuition either. In How Should a Person Be? (2010), the main character, also called Sheila, tries to answer the question posed by the title through minute observation of her closest friends ...”

“... Everything I put on reflected something bad about me. There are several collections of clothes in Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton’s book about the problem of dressing, Women in Clothes (Particular Books, £24): from the impossibly glamorous 16 fur coats in teddy-bear shades belonging to Marlene Barber to the mundane 47 hair grips, black ...”

“... the hip blend of fiction and memoir associated with writers like Knausgaard, Ben Lerner or Sheila Heti. If most of Crudo is true, then what does the novel gain by being a novel at all? At the back of the book, all the quotations are identified, providing a key of sorts. But Laing’s own Twitter feed is another key to the novel, as is the sort of ...”

“... doesn’t strike me as a better or more important achievement than having one – or none. Sheila Heti’s new book, Motherhood, confronts the philosophical questions raised by childbearing and womanhood in a narrative both fictional and non-fictional. ‘I know a woman who refuses to mother, refuses to do the most important thing,’ ...”

“... ago in the Guardian. ‘Deeply feminist, formally both out of control and expertly in control,’ Sheila Heti wrote in the Believer in 2013. ‘Once it came into my hands it didn’t leave them until the book was done.’ So back to the basic setup: 3 December 1994 is the date of the primal sushi dinner in Pasadena. It’s followed by much alcohol at ...”

“... have become the cult classic it’s now considered to be: ‘a shared favourite’ according to Sheila Heti; ‘the book Nora Ephron read every four years’, the new edition proudly informs us. (Mlotek claimed in her New York Times piece that she read it on average ‘every four or five months’.) Why otherwise would anyone seek to find clues about ...”

“... the taboo, the unsayable, the material grounded in shame, is what literature must express. From Sheila Heti, that dedication to art can be a valid substitute for procreation and family life, leading to ‘Book Babies’ in place of human ones. Well, sure. Not incorrect but somewhat trite takeaways, as a dweeb on NPR might say. In the shadow of these ...”

“... Uncle Tom’s Cabin) for evidence of historical affect. Contemporary novels by authors such as Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh and Jenny Offill convey the inertia and passivity Berlant describes in Cruel Optimism. In Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), the central character drugs herself with sleeping pills to switch off from ‘anything ...”

“... their boyfriends, with non sequiturs, odd questions and unexpected barbs, like a Miranda July or Sheila Heti character but meaner. The writing is only unmemorable because the existence Flattery depicts is too. The clipped quirkiness of her prose relieves the text of the burden of narrative, which to Flattery usually means tedious contrivance or ...”