National Network for Equitable Library Service

Ticknor is the first novel by Sheila Heti, the author of the acclaimed story collection The Middle Stories and, with Misha Glouberman, the essay collection The Chairs are Where the People Go. George Ticknor is trying to reconcile his own failure with the success of his boyhood friend, the famous American historian William Prescott. Ticknor's life has been reduced to a series of awkward meetings, failed dinner parties, and other misfortunes he is loath to own up to. Situated in the complicated and contradictory moments that make friendships both tenuous and difficult to relinquish, Ticknor's fixated thoughts about his and Prescott's dissimilar fates lead him through a litany of rationalizations and recriminations, a psychological maze that is paranoid and harrowing as well as ludicrous and absurd. In George Ticknor, Sheila Heti has created a memorable new hero of Prufrockian dimension. Ticknor is an exquisite singularity.