Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
The Selected Stories of Bette Howland
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed collection that restored to the literary canon "a long-overlooked artist of live-wire incisiveness, shredding wit, and improbable beauty."
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage restores to the literary canon an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent, with Guggenheim and MacArthur “genius” fellowships, before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life when her work was rediscovered.
Bette Howland herself was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighborhood in Chicago; a divorcée and single mother, to the disapproval of her family; an artist chipped away at by poverty and perfection. Each of these facets plays a central role in her work. Mining her deepest emotions for her art, she chronicles the tensions of her generation—and her native city—with a flair for language in the tradition of Lucia Berlin, Kathleen Collins, and Grace Paley. Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage introduces a new generation of readers to a wry, brilliant observer and a writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humor. With an afterword by Honor Moore.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This stellar posthumous collection of stories from Howland (1937 2017) brings together works that span her career. Largely autobiographical and incredibly self-aware, Howland's stories conjure vivid portraits of her home city of Chicago and bring to life the hypnotic thoughts of her narrators among their wide casts of vividly drawn characters. In "Blue in Chicago," the narrator attends a wedding with her eccentric extended family, which is juxtaposed in the story against moments of peace on her own as a single mother living on the city's South Side. "To the Country" follows the same character to a summer rental house, but its charms are marred by the neighbors including a family of farmers she has known since her own childhood. Within these straightforward setups, Howland creates stark and strange works of genius, portraying the complexities of family relationships as beautifully as she portrays her narrators' insecurities, judgments, and anxieties. Her descriptions are darkly funny and delightful ("Up went my mother's head, straight as a barrel rifle. Loaded, of course"). The collection's masterpiece title novella is written from its heartbroken narrator to a "you," a recently deceased love, following his last days living as an academic legend, famed lover of women, and devastating alcoholic. This character, Victor Lazarus "your long arms, your long legs, your rigid upright drunken dignity" comes alive through his death in this potent, heartbreaking, often hilarious showstopper of a story. This is a collection to savor, and Howland is an author to celebrate.
