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

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.


About the Author
Bette Howland (1937-2017) published three books in her lifetime: W-3, and the story collections Blue in Chicago and Things to Come and Go. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, after which she did not publish another book. Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, her selected stories, was published in 2019, restoring to the canon the work of a remarkable writer.

Honor Moore is the author of Our Revolution; The Bishop's Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The White Blackbird, a New York Times Notable Book; as well as three collections of poems. She lives in New York City.