Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: The Selected Stories of Bette Howland

"An insanely sane mix of the hard-to-fight city in the '70s and the accidental poetry of families stumbling through time." --Robert Sullivan, Vogue

"Loving, lacerating sketches... With her flexible stance toward reality, her eye for the amusing, curious, minutiae of existence, and her tonal range, Howland recalls the short-story writer Lucia Berlin." --Abigail Deutsch, Harper's

"A compassionate, trenchant, and hilarious ethnographer of eccentricities and dysfunction, Howland now takes her place in Chicago's literary pantheon along with her mentor, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Barry Gifford, Stuart Dybek, Joseph Epstein, and Peter Orner." --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Howland's insights into the shifting gender dynamics that would reshape, or at least disrupt, the patriarchy, are just one facet of the revolutionary nature of her work. Why then, did it disappear from the discourse?... The recent celebration of fellow forgotten female artists, the short story writer Lucia Berlin, championed by Lydia Davis, or the painter Hilma af Klint, showcased at the Guggenheim, reminds us how necessary it is to restore these visionaries. --Jenessa Abrams, Guernica

"That Bette Howland produced any books at all is a testament to her determination, for until she won the MacArthur she lived nearly always at or below the poverty line.... Yet Howland refused to abandon her dreams of a writing life. "She typed more than a hundred words a minute," her son recalled, "firing her Selectric day and night through my childhood like a machine gun." Given such circumstances, one might assume that Howland's writing would present a kind of literature of grievance, but one would be wrong. The energy in her fiction comes instead from a ferocious sense of engagement.... A stubborn avidity crowds out despair." --Donna Rifkind, Wall Street Journal

"Like Bellow, Howland was a bard of Chicago, even at its most alarming.... A voice at once gritty and lyrical, despairing even while tenaciously holding onto hope. That Howland's work is back with us again shows that hope won out, after all. --Diane Cole, Jewish Week

"A Public Space might be responsible for the best lost-now-found title of 2019 with Chicago-born author Bette Howland's dry but empathetic brand of fiction. Just like Eve Babitz and Lucia Berlin before her, the Guggenheim and MacArthur 'genius' fellowship-winning Howland is now available for a new generation to discover." --Jason Diamond

The stories of Bette Howland return to you like friends met once in a dream--strange, familiar, roughing up the texture of your days. These are stories that defy classification, but seem as fresh and vital as though they were written last week. The revival of Howland's work is one of the best things to have happened in recent memory.
--Madeleine Watts, McNally Jackson

Calm Sea and Pros-per-ous Voy-age is a book to be savored... Howland's char-ac-ters illu-mi-nate a soul-ful por-trait of 1970s Chica-go that, thanks to its obser-va-tions on race, crime, and gen-tri-fi-ca-tion, could just as eas-i-ly depict Amer-i-ca today.
--Jessie Szalay, Jewish Book Council

Howland's powers of observation are like military-grade weapons.
--University of Chicago Magazine

Howland's sense of humor illuminates every page, and even her sharpest barbs glint with wisdom and humanity.... the rightful (after)life that awaits her work is that she be recognized as a Chicago writer of near-universal delight.
--Kathleen Rooney, Chicago Tribune Notable Books of 2019