Lori, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only "to love and to be loved," but also "to be worthy of life itself." Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector's attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: "I humanized myself," she said. "The book reflects that."

Sheila Heti, author of the acclaimed How a Person Should Be? and coeditor of the best-selling anthology Women in Clothes, along with the students of 826 Valencia writing lab will edit this year's anthology. Their compilation includes new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and the category-defying gems that have become one of the hallmarks of this lively collection.

**A Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Irish Times, Refinery29, TLS and The White Review Book of the Year 2018** A provocative novel about the desire and duty to procreate, from the author of the critically acclaimed How Should A Person Be? Motherhood treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood - whether or not to have children - with the intelligence, wit and originality that have won Sheila Heti international acclaim. Having reached an age when most of her peers are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Heti's narrator considers, with the same urgency, whether she will do so at all. Over the course of several years, under the influence of her partner, body, family, friends, mysticism and chance, she struggles to make a moral and meaningful choice. In a compellingly direct mode that straddles the forms of the novel and the essay, Motherhood raises radical and essential questions about womanhood, parenthood, and how - and for whom - to live. 'Likely to become the defining literary work on the subject' Guardian

** SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2023** ** WINNER OF THE 2022 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD IN FICTION** Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, and more What if this world is just a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed? In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal - to what, she doesn't know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters that strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up. Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling and a shape-shifting epic that is celestially bright and streaked with beauty. 'Beautiful and impossible to put down. Sheila Heti is a genius.' Avni Doshi 'This one-of-a-kind novel... feels nothing less than vital.' Observer 'An original, a book that says something new for our difficult times.' Anne Enright, Guardian 'A treat.' Stylist _______________________ PRAISE FOR SHEILA HETI: 'Exhilarating...it made me want to write' Sally Rooney, on How Should a Person Be? 'Sheila Heti has broken new ground' Rachel Cusk, on Motherhood 'Complex, artfully messy and hilarious' Miranda July, on How Should a Person Be? 'Thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving' Garth Greenwell, on Motherhood 'Courageous, necessary, visionary' Elif Batuman, on Motherhood

'Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?' Published for the first time as a standalone volume, Virginia Woolf's short, impassioned essay, How Should One Read a Book? celebrates the enduring importance of great literature. In this timeless manifesto on the written word, rediscover the joy of reading and the power of a good book to change the world. One of the most significant modernist writers of the 20th Century, Virginia Woolf and her visionary essays are as relevant today as they were nearly one hundred years ago. Features a new introduction by Sheila Heti.

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 Sheila's twenties were going to plan. She got married. She hosted parties. A theatre asked her to write a play. Then she realised that she didn't know how to write a play. That her favourite part of the party was cleaning up after the party. And that her marriage made her feel like she was banging into a brick wall. 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. She throws herself into recording them and everyone around her, investigating how they live, desperate to know, as she wanders, How Should a Person Be? Using transcripts, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction, Heti crafts an exciting, courageous, and mordantly funny tour through one woman's heart and mind.

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.

A unique love story and a classic work of philosophy, rooted in the mysterious workings of the human heart and mind. With an introduction by Sheila Heti. 'De Botton is a national treasure.' - Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved. A man and a woman meet over casual conversation on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins a love story - from first kiss to first argument, elation to heartbreak, and everything in between. Each stage of the relationship is illuminated with startling clarity, as Alain de Botton explores emotions often felt but rarely understood. With the verve of a novelist and the insight of a philosopher, de Botton uncovers the mysteries of the human heart. Essays In Love is an iconic book - one that should be read by anyone who has ever fallen in love.

Balancing wisdom and innocence, joy and foreboding, Sheila Heti's completely original stories lead you to surprising places. Globe and Mail critic Russell Smith has described Heti's stories as cryptic fairy tales without morals at the end, but really the morals are in the quality of the telling and in the details disclosed along the way. Look where you weren't going to look, think what you wouldn't have thought, Heti seems to say, and meaning itself gains more meaning, more dimensions. Heti's stories are not what you expect, but why did you expect that anyway? This special new edition features nine new stories that were not available in the first Canadian edition.

Distantly inspired by the real-life friendship between the great historian William Hickling Prescott and his biographer, 'Ticknor' is a witty, fantastical study of resentment; and a biting history of a one-sided friendship.

"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?