Bette Howland

"Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage restores to the literary canon an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent in the 1980s before all but disappearing from public view for decades ... With direct and powerful language in the tradition of Lucia Berlin, Kathleen Collins, and Grace Paley, Howland chronicles the tensions of her generation"--Dust jacket flap.

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

'One of the significant writers of her generation.' Saul Bellow 'Her prose is cooler than a cocktail and sharper than a Japanese knife . . . Nora Ephron meets Lorrie Moore, which is about as good as it gets.' Rachel Cooke, Observer 'We should be glad to have her back . . . Howland has the pinpoint vision that can make any sentence into a jewel.' John Self, The Times Blue in Chicago brings together the bittersweet short stories of the remarkable American writer Bette Howland. Hailed as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view, this tenderly compiled collection restores her vital voice to our shelves. Bette Howland was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighborhood in Chicago; a divorcee and single mother, to the disapproval of her Jewish family; an artist chipped away at by poverty and self-doubt. Her stories radiate a passionate commitment to the lives of ordinary people and the humble grace of everyday. From city streets to the hospital to the public library to the mundane family outing, her sly humour, aching melancholy and tender insight illuminate every page. Here is an astonishing literary voice rediscovered. Blue in Chicago features an afterword by Honor Moore and was published in the US under the title Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. 'Beautifully bittersweet . . . funny, ruefully poetic and effortlessly perceptive.' Daily Mail 'Captivating writing: rhythmic, alert, empathetic . . . I haven’t enjoyed another book more this year.' Telegraph 'Profound . . . To read Bette Howland is to be handed a gift you didn't know you needed.' Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch

And Other Stories

Blue in Chicago

Three stories of endurance, fidelity, and compassion reveal the emotional content of the lives of ordinary men and women and illuminate the extraordinary in the simple

Three Stories

Things to Come and Go

'Stunning power and beauty abound in this book.' - The New York Times 'Howland recalls the short-story writer Lucia Berlin' - Harper's Magazine 'Honest, acerbic, alert, and always dazzling.' - Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana Things to Come and Go showcases the incomparable talent of Bette Howland in three novellas of stunning power, beauty, and sustaining humour. ‘Birds of a Feather’ is a daughter’s story of her extended, first-generation family, the ‘big, brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels’. Esti, a merciless, astute observer, recalls growing up amid (the confusions and difficulties of) their history, quarrels, judgements, and noisy love, and the sense of estrangement and inescapable bonds of blood. The clamour of the city, both its threat and its possibility, are just outside the door in ‘The Old Wheeze’, as a single mother in her twenties returns to her sunless apartment after a date at the ballet. Shifting between four viewpoints – the young woman, the older professor who took her out, her son, and her son’s babysitter – the story masterfully captures the impossibility of liberating ourselves from the self. In ‘The Life You Gave Me’, a woman at the midpoint of life is called to her father’s sickbed. A lament for all that is forever unsaid and unsayable, the story is ‘an anguished meditation on growing up, growing old and being left behind, a complaint against time.’ (The New York Times) First published in 1984, Things to Come and Go, Bette Howland’s final book, is a collection of haunting urgency about arrivals and departures, and the private, insoluble dramas in the lives of three women. This edition features an introduction by Rumaan Alam, bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

Bette Howland's illuminating and bracing account of life in a psych ward, which marked her powerful entrance onto the literary scene, now with an introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End.

A Memoir

Paviljoen 3

The bittersweet, sharply observed stories in Blue in Chicago introduce British readers for the first time to Bette Howland, a forgotten great of twentieth-century American fiction, perfect for fans of Lucia Berlin, Lydia Davis and Alice Munroe.

"Chicago, a partitioned city, walled and wired" is the place, and Bette Howland's blue-collar, working-class Jewish family are the people. In a city torn by racial tensions, poverty and decay, they represent the less glamorous but more enduring aspects of urban life. There is the Bobbe, the fiercely independent grandmother and proud family matriarch who watches the world go by from the lobby of her apartment building and who, in an intensely moving finale, surmounts the indignity of dying. And Uncle Rudy, an obstinate and unpredictable force, out of the mainstream, a Jewish cop alienated from the rest of his family. In a Chicago as "blue as distances" Bette Howland introduces us to the other victimes: the tired, the old, the counted out. Unacknowledged, frustrated, battered, these are the people who are silent, but not necessarily a majority. Above all, they are the survivors in a world where love and reproach are inextricably connected. It is impossible to remain unmoved by the people Bette Howland knows and describes in this chronicle. Blue in Chicago captures not only the pulse of a city in the midst of change, but more importantly, the pulse of the human heartbeat.

The acclaimed collection that restored to the literary canon "a long-overlooked artist of live-wire incisiveness, shredding wit, and improbable beauty."

The Selected Stories of Bette Howland

W-3 is one hell of a debut' Lucy Scholes, Paris Review 'Remarkably perceptive and wise' Katy Waldman, New Yorker 'Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of disheveled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence. Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968, Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and labouring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow’s apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills. W-3 is both an extraordinary portrait of the community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer’s life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave. This beautiful edition features an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End. ‘For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life could begin. At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.’

Bette Howland

About

Books

Join the club