“It's hard to say what The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City is about exactly. And that's a good thing.... Intelligent, quirky, charming, hard to classify... A sign of health in the publishing industry.” - LATimes.com
"Like a cross between your wisest, kindest and funniest friend and your eccentric uncle… It’s about interacting with people in an authentic and respectful and playful way. It’s certainly a pleasure to spend a few hours with Misha Glouberman now that Sheila Heti has introduced him to us." - Prism International (on The Chairs Are Where the People Go)
"If I had a publishing house, the first thing I would do is publish How Should a Person Be?," [Mark] Greif said. "If a book like this, that is so visibly of our moment, can't be published in America, it makes me wonder, what do we even bother with literature for?" - New York Observer
"[How Should a Person Be?] is an unforgettable book: intellectually exacting, unsettling in its fragility, bodily as anything painted by Freud, experimental yet crafted as hell, and yes, very funny. When I finished it, I was reluctant to leave its world. It had drawn circles around me and I did not want to step out of them." - Claudia Dey, The National Post
"How Should a Person Be? is an ardent account of a young woman's unsentimental education as a writer in the Toronto art scene. Deftly blending discursive personal essays, a novel-like narrative, and transcripts of recorded conversations (and emails), Heti's tale is witty, bawdy, intimate, and hilarious—reading her work is like spending a day with your new best friend." - Bookforum
"[How Should a Person Be is] a much-needed mythology provided by a novelist pitched at her most deliriously insightful..." - Eye Weekly
"Heti comes off as Henry Miller in a hoodie." - The Quarterly Conversation (on How Should a Person Be?)
“…thrillingly alive… demanding and accessible at the same time… You want to rattle around inside the real-life Heti's head long after the pages go blank. How Should a Person Be? emerges as part of an entirely different genre: the realistic self-help book. You might not want to follow in Sheila's footsteps, but tagging along on her quixotic mission will be as useful as anything else you're likely to read this year.” - Vue Weekly
"Ticknor is one of the year's most enjoyable and formally impressive books." - Benjamin Lytal, New York Sun
"Ticknor is a work brilliantly crafted to deliver its revelations and redemptions. It is stylish and slim, but original, and full of feeling." - Anna Godbersen, Esquire
"Heti... has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled." - Mark Sarvas, Boldtype (on Ticknor)
"Ticknor... proves that the art of narrative remains strong enough to take us anywhere at all." - Stephen Osborne, Geist
"What Heti has created in [Ticknor's] fictional counterpart is not a monument or an idol but something more human and compelling—a flawed man trapped and shaped by the vagaries of history." - Nicole Lamy, Harvard Review
"...a tiny postmodern diamond." - Britt Peterson, San Francisco Chronicle
"Ticknor... is a small masterpiece of bile." - Frank Moher, National Post
"Heti has proved once again that no matter how congested our literary byways become, she can be counted on to beat a path entirely her own." - Melanie Little, Ottawa Citizen
"The Middle Stories heralds in a New Nihilism, a smack in the face of conservative fiction." - Steven Naylor, Literary Review of Canada
"They are the sort of stories you would read to children before tucking them into bed for the night, if you wanted them to wrestle with existential angst before falling asleep." - Alan Reed, See Magazine
"Heti's prose style is deceptively simple but slyly incisive... As with Rorschach ink blots, how the stories are interpreted says more about the reader than the writer. " - Eva Tihanyi, Toronto Star(on The Middle Stories)